Bruno Latour’s upcoming Gifford Lectures sound remarkable. See ANTHEM for the details.
There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.
[. . .]
A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to explore in sufficient detail the scientific and political composition of the common world.
Perhaps the promise of Latour’s work — aside from its sociological and science-studies import — is reaching a new culmination as the religious and ecological threads he’s been toying with for so long come to their mutual fruition.
Thanks to Adam for the head’s-up.
do you share Latour’s flat ontology or Harman’s critique of it?
http://newbooksinreligion.com/2012/11/05/s-brent-plate-religion-and-film-cinema-and-the-re-creation-of-the-world-wallflower-press-2008/
dmf –
I’m not sure which critique of Harman’s you have in mind. But I’ve discussed “flatness” in a couple of previous posts: see here and here.
A couple of pieces:
“[Delanda’s] descriptions of things result in a view of the world as richly heterogeneous, made up of morphogenetic (form-generating) processes, with different kinds of networks and assemblages unfolding at multiple, nested scales. One could say (as he suggests) that these things are ontologically “flat” because they are the same kinds of things, following the same kinds of morphogenetic processes. But a world in which novel things emerge and become habits — an irreversible world in which newness becomes generative of even more newness, with emergent processes occurring at “higher levels” of encompassment/range/territorialization than others (for instance, with human beings emerging at an ontologically higher level of complexity than that that of the cells making up their bodies, even though the higher forms remain at risk of being disrupted from within by the lower, say, if one of the latter becomes cancerous) — that, to me, is a world that is ontologically less and less flat and more and more lumpy, scaled and nested, vertically and horizontally complex, rich, and deep. [. . .]
“There’s a certain allergy theorists on the left have toward the very idea of ‘hierarchy,’ but that allergy ignores the difference between functional hierarchies (things interacting with things at different structural levels) and moral or valuative hierarchies (some things being more highly valued than other things). What DeLanda actually does is flatten certain differences while expanding, augmenting, or opening up others. Anything that aims to be a perfectly flat ontology eradicates the possibility of accounting for such structural levels and scales. So I would argue that the obeisance (that’s become a bit too common) to the idea of ontological ‘flatness’ has made its point and might ultimately be expendable. Another way of putting this is that the ‘horizontalities’ and ‘verticalities’ (to use Frow’s terms, cited by Bennett in the passage quoted above) might not be properties of the world, but just properties of our perspective on things. The world is more hybrid, plural, and multidimensional than that, and we are better off pluralizing its verticals than flattening them.”
Hello. I just came across this post. I’m originalIy from Vermont (grew up in Waterbury Center) and am currently in Edinburgh attending this lecture series. While here, I’m looking to better understand and grasp what Latour is bringing forth, make sense of how I might be able to move more powerfully in my professional (business) world from it, and join a conversation with others who are in the same boat. Are you at this conference? Is anyone from the UVM School of Environment and Natural Resources here? If so, I’d love to meet up. If not, some participants of the conference and I are working on articulating the lecture series on a wiki at https://latourgifford2013.wikispaces.com/ . Join in if you’d like.
https://www.academia.edu/9863626/BRUNO_LATOURS_METAPHYSICS_OF_RELIGION
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