If there’s a musical demonstration of relationalism, and by extension (as Skholiast points out) of ecology, it’s the kind of improvised music that the Dead are supposed to have excelled at (and occasionally did). The universe gives rise to many wondrous entities in its long history of spontaneity, relational responsiveness, habit-formation, and form-building. The habits start as rhythms, melodic chirps that turn into territorial refrains and calls, and that gradually maneuvre their way into verse patterns, melodies, harmonies, polyrhythms. Distinct songs develop for particular purposes and gradually get freed from those purposes, taken up into improvisational routines and performances, some of which crystallize into larger-scale architectonics, but only ever temporarily.
Search Results for 'process-relational'
relationalism, earth jazz, & the solstice
Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, improvisation, Miles Davis, music, object-oriented philosophy, paganism, relationalism, solstice on June 20, 2010 | 9 Comments »
half-way house
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Bennett, Ranciere on June 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The further I have gotten into Vibrant Matter, the more I have been thinking of it as a kind of half-way house on the route to a process-relational ontology. (I’ll admit I’ve read the whole book now, but I’m trying to defer my comments on the final chapter till next week. And I also strongly […]
daughter objects (& processes)
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead on June 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Levi has a nice post on pedagogy, objects, and his daughter. His conclusions, I think, can be rephrased in terms more amenable to an objects-relations dialogue. [. . .] Since Graham has set out a challenge (“Take that, relationists!”), I’ll take a very quick stab at a process-relational reply:
networkologies
Posted in Philosophy on May 28, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Chris at Networkologies has an excellent reply to my post on time- and crystal-images and the campaign ads he had described here. Chris writes: When we first see a campaign ad, our first thought might not be that there is virtuality lurking within the images before us, but of course, for Deleuze, there is virtuality […]
Bennett’s thing-power
Posted in Philosophy on May 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »
The Vibrant Matter Reading Group has launched: see Peter Gratton’s generous flow of postings at Philosophy in a Time of Error, all linked here. What follows is my first series of thoughts on the book, with a focus on chapter 1. I’ll try to add bits of these as appropriate to the comments in Peter’s […]
between Whitehead & Peirce
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Peirce, Whitehead on May 12, 2010 | 9 Comments »
The case has often been made — by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others — that Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist), relational, evolutionary, and non-dualistic in […]
cataclysmic eventology
Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, Derrida, ecoapocalypse, eventology, Nagarjuna, Resnais, trauma on April 23, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959) In my reply to kvond’s and Meg’s comments on the Event, I alluded to a quote from Derrida’s Cinders, which I thought would be worth posting, especially since I can’t find any reference to it online and I don’t have the book handy to check it. “At what […]
subjects & objects, together or apart…
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Bryant, Deleuze, Harman, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead on April 9, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Levi Bryant’s detailed and generous replies to my critical queries, both in the comments section of this post and at Larval Subjects, and Graham Harman’s replies here (and in an e-mail exchange) have helped me get a much clearer sense of where the main differences lie between their respective “object-oriented” positions and my relational view. […]
philosophy of the moment
Posted in Philosophy, tagged pragmatism on April 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Jeff Carrera’s Philosophy is Not a Luxury has been posting some pithy articulations of the process-relational philosophies of James, Dewey, Peirce, and others in the American pragmatist tradition. It’s too bad that the word “pragmatism” in its everyday sense doesn’t do justice to these thinkers — rather like the terms “stoicism” and “epicureanism” don’t do […]
space junk & the (relational) Real
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Bryant, geophilosophy, Harman, Jameson, Lacan, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead on April 6, 2010 | 5 Comments »
(This post spun off from the last, where I concluded by noting the increasing amount of debris out in the upper atmosphere. Somehow I couldn’t resist pulling that image into the vortex of ecopolitics and the objects-relations debate, which is carrying on at hyper tiling, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Larval Subjects, and elsewhere.) Like the tail of […]
cinema, ontology, ecology
Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecology, film, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, Whitehead on March 14, 2010 | 8 Comments »
I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed. Here’s one articulation of that model. [. . .]
more serious (nutritious) morsels…
Posted in Blog stuff, tagged blogosphere, post-constructivism, Whitehead on February 25, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Judith Butler’s recent talk on Alfred North Whitehead, which you can listen to here, is very impressive — and a heartening sign of the times. With Butler distancing herself from some of the implications of her earlier work on sex and gender (30-some minutes into the talk) and decisively settling into post-constructivist, non-anthropocentric, process-relational*, immanent […]