To the extent that ontological questions drive my recent writing (which includes Ecologies of the Moving Image, Ecologies of Identity, and a metaphysical manifesto-thriller called Why Objects Fly Out the Window), they are predominantly the following two: How do things enter into relation with other things? What happens (in the world) when they do? In […]
Archive for the ‘Process-relational thought’ Category
Ecosophy-G
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged ecosophy, ecosophy-G, eventology, Guattari, Naess, Ontology, epistemology on March 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
s(S)peculative r(R)ealism & philosophy-as-life
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged correlationism, ethics, Meillassoux, philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead 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 […]
Paradigms, productivity, perspective
Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy on January 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Levi Bryant responds to my last post (and by extension to Chris Vitale’s) here. I agree with him that he and Graham Harman have made worthy efforts at addressing concerns that are central to process-relational philosophical communities (e.g., in Bryant’s Difference and Givenness and in the books of Harman’s that I’ve lauded on this blog); […]
Vitale throws down the gauntlet…
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy on January 14, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Chris Vitale has “thrown down the gauntlet,” as he puts it, to the object-oriented ontologists to finally respond in a satisfactory way to process-relational critiques. (I admire his Sicilian bravado!) Chris is obviously writing in a somewhat feverish mode, blogging at the speed of thought rather than in the tempered and cautious tone written philosophy […]
On anthropomorphism: making humans, pencils, & souls
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged animism, anthropomorphism, Jung, Latour, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead 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 […]
Agreements & productive differences
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Bryant, OOO on December 13, 2010 | 10 Comments »
Levi Bryant has proposed a ceasefire on the objects/relations debate, and followed that up with a nice post calling for self-moderation of our more confrontational urges and for a more affirmative writing (and blogging) style that would render the form of our writing more consonant with its content. I’m all for the latter; it’s something […]
Being knowing, knowing being
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead 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 […]
repetition with (slight) difference
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Bryant, object-oriented philosophy on December 10, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Just a few quick responses to Levi Bryant. Levi writes: 1) entities are nonetheless patterned or structured despite their becoming, 2) they are unities, and 3) they cannot be submerged in or exhausted by their relations. Relations can always be detached. Objects can always enter into new relations. [. . .] if you hold that […]
the attractions of process (metaphysics)
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, Whitehead 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 […]
conversions & convertibles
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Harman, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism on December 5, 2010 | 4 Comments »
(I try not to edit things once they’re published, but I couldn’t resist adding a Chevy Impala to this blog.) It may not quite be Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, as Graham Harman’s blog post title suggests, but Chris Vitale has clearly had a change of heart, a dropping of resistance that’s resulted […]
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.
[. . .]
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.
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