The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we […]
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
weird life, shadow biospheres, dark signs… & quakes
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged cosmos, nature, Peirce, semiosis, theology on February 27, 2010 | 23 Comments »
readings
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, tagged affect, geophilosophy, theory on February 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I’m reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi’s recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied/embedded/distributive/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant […]
Bryant’s objects & a possible object/subjectology
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Bryant, Harman, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead on January 31, 2010 | 9 Comments »
Reading Levi Bryant’s blog sometimes feels like having a brilliant storm of white-hot thought rain down upon one’s backyard garden, the shoots struggling to stay vertical, but rendered that much stronger after the rain. There are wonderful passages in his recent musings on ethics, relations, objects, and ontology. From Ethical Etymologies: Thinking Out Loud (Always […]
visualizing immanence
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged biosemiotics, complexity, documentaries, immanence on January 30, 2010 | 6 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTH4VSIQZw?fs=1&hl=en_US This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos/complexity theory, etc.), the “butterfly effect,” fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward […]
the politics of objects & relations
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged Bergson, Bryant, Buddhism, Deleuze, Harman, object-oriented philosophy, political theory, relationalism, speculative realism, Spinoza, Whitehead on January 29, 2010 | 5 Comments »
The objects versus relations debate has revved up again over at Larval Subjects, in the commentary responding to Levi Bryant’s Questions about the possibility of non-correlationist ethics. The debate, as I would describe it, circles around the following question: If we agree that traditional philosophy has been too centrally premised on the relationship between humans […]
ecology, Deleuze/Tarkovsky, & the time-image
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged Deleuze, ecocinema, ecology, great scenes, pantheism, Tarkovsky, time on January 16, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books make for difficult reading, and if one is to make headway into them, it helps not only to know something about Bergsonian philosophy, Piercian semiotics, and the history of film, but also to have clips at hand of the films Deleuze discusses. Fortunately, Corry Shores has been very helpfully compiling such clips, with excerpts from the books, at his Deleuze Cinema Project 1 blog site. [. . .]
As an art form of time, cinema can help us arrive at a more adequate understanding of the nature of time. If Deleuze is correct and the production and dissemination of a “direct” image of time within cinema expands our capacity to conceive of our own and the world’s temporality — or, rather, expands our capacities for ethically inhabiting time, for thinking, feeling, and affectively being with others, for generating productive syntheses in the differential fabric of the world, for becoming — then moving-image media hold great potential for our ability to understand and visualize the relationship between the world and ourselves in our common nature as time, duration, becoming, and change. [. . .]
subjectivity, impermanence, & dark flow
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, flow, Lacan, meditation, mindfulness, Ontology, epistemology, Shinzen Young, Vipassana, Whitehead on December 7, 2009 | 19 Comments »
I think the idea and image of dark flow streaming out of our universe has also been resonating with me because of the work I’ve been doing using Vipassana teacher Shinzen Young’s system of mindfulness training. [. . .] Dark Flow is the (cosmic) Real, the shimmering atomic structure of things behind the structured object-world we (think we) see, the wave-like spirit-energy that Buddhists calls “emptiness” only because giving it a more substantialist term would already be a way of trying to contain it. Call it emptiness, or dark flow. If astrophysicists hadn’t “seen” it, we would have had to invent it. (I mean we, invent, it.)
‘dark flow’ & the vitality of emptiness
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged Buddhism, dark vitalism, emptiness, Lacan, Zizek on December 1, 2009 | 5 Comments »
The image of dark flow, described as 1400 galaxy clusters streaming toward the edge of the universe at blistering speed in the ongoing “afterglow” of the big bang (or something like that), has haunted me ever since I read about it several days ago. Caused “shortly after the big bang by something no longer in […]
more on Žižek & nature’s discontents
Posted in Philosophy, tagged speculative realism, Zizek on November 30, 2009 | 2 Comments »
It’s interesting to watch a topic spin itself out rhizomically across the blogosphere. Picking up on Žižek’s ecological musings, Levi Bryant seems more or less in agreement with what I had argued here last week, as does Michael Austin, while Ben Woodard criticizes the narrowing of the “ecology of concepts of nature” (a point I […]
Žižek and his Others
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, ecology, environmentalism, Lacan, paganism, Zizek on November 24, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj Žižek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually “in power” — the current chair, former chair, and at least one other faculty member, plus […]
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