Tim Morton, “They are here”
Talking Heads video “Crosseyed and painless” (dir. Toni Basil, featured the Elecric Boogaloos). Is the non-national anthem of global anxiety. The sound of the end of the world and beginning of history. The first moonwalk is here (not Michael Jackson). The Levinasian “il y-a”, environmental creepiness, but we don’t know what yet. The dancers are suspended in claustrophobic white space, in their world.
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy | Tagged Nonhuman Turn, Tim Morton | 6 Comments »
I took a break from live-blogging [added later: I had originally written “love-bloggin” LOL. I won’t correct other typos, but there’re probably many of them here] during the break-out sessions, taking advantage of the time to work a bit more on my own paper, to be given this afternoon. I’m picking things up now with Steven Shaviro’s plenary. Since Steven regularly blogs his work (at The Pinocchio Theory), and since I’m getting a little worn out keeping up with our great speakers, this may be a little less detailed.
Steven Shaviro, “Consequences of Panpsychism”
Opening caveats: We should resist conflating Speculative Realism with OOO; it’s like conflating animals with cats. Also, use of “human” better as an adjective than as a noun.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Nonhuman Turn, Shaviro | 2 Comments »
Our morning plenarist is Jane Bennett, whose work has been discussed extensively on this blog before (e.g., here).
Introduction by Kennan Ferguson: will Jane B. be throwing down a gauntlet?
Jane Bennett: “Systems & Things: a materialist and an object-oriented philosopher walk into a bar…”
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Nonhuman Turn | 4 Comments »
Day 2 at The Nonhuman Turn.
Richard Grusin: Why Nonhuman? Why Now?
The CFP for this conference elicited lively comments and concerns on Facebook walls (Ken Wark’s and Alex Galloway’s): expression of “turn fatigue” (:-) [ai: my first proposal was about just that], and a concern that this would ipso facto be a conference of speculative realism or OOO.The CFP reactivated debates from third New York OOO symposium.
Posted in Academe, Media ecology | Tagged Nonhuman Turn | 1 Comment »
The most popular word in the paper titles of this conference is…
Object (10 mentions)
Runner-up: Media/mediation (9)
Honorable mention: Nonhuman; Affect/affectivity/affection; Animal(s)/animality (4 each).
Figure that… Yet, judging by yesterday’s plenaries, objects are under fire.
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Plenary #2: Erin Manning, “Another Regard”
Discussion of Nathaniel Stern’s art installation.
Epigraph from Dawn Prince (anthropologist, worked with gorillas, written memoirs on her autistic experience with gorillas)
1st movement: Are you a gorilla?
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Nonhuman Turn | 2 Comments »
Question: What is the most popular word in conference paper titles? First correct guess wins a prize. (Not sure what the prize is yet… but it will probably consist of letters.)
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This is the first of my blog posts from the Nonhuman Turn conference. These will be uploaded as they come over the next two and a half days. Special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee for making this as easy as it is, and to Mary Mullen for making sure it is that way.
I arrived at the conference site not a moment too soon: the nonhuman rain (“like a monsoon,” someone just said) began pouring down almost as I stepped into the building. Milwaukee looked lovely through the window of the cab from the airport: all green and breathy with that pre-rain anticipation. I used to visit it a lot when I lived and taught in Oshkosh (ten years ago), but I don’t remember it being as green as this or having so many beaches up the lake.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Nonhuman Turn | 2 Comments »
I’m on my way to Milwaukee for the Nonhuman Turn conference. I will do my best to live-blog from it, though that will depend on the technology the U of Wisconsin Milwaukee offers conference participants. Stay tuned.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Nonhuman Turn | Leave a Comment »
“Ultimately, the thinking of speculative pragmatism that is activist philosophy belongs to nature. Its aesthetico-politics compose a nature philosophy. The occurrent arts in which it exhibits itself are politics of nature.
“The one-word summary of its relational-qualitative goings on: ecology. Activist philosophy concerns the ecology of powers of existence. Becomings in the midst. Creative change taking place, self-enjoying, humanly or no, humanly and more.”
These two short paragraphs close the Introduction to Brian Massumi’s recent, and thoroughly Whiteheadian, book Semblance and Event. They serve as a good epigraph to what I’d like to discuss here, which is the “neo-Whiteheadian wave” I see arising in cultural theory and its connections to ecology and to “speculative realism” (which, in Massumi’s hands, becomes speculative pragmatism; the differences are worth exploring).
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged environmental philosophy, object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 12 Comments »
CALL FOR PAPERS
Meeting of The International Association for Environmental Philosophy
at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association—Eastern Division
December 27-30, 2012, Marriott Atlanta Marquis, Atlanta, GA
Posted in Academe | Tagged environmental philosophy | Leave a Comment »
An interesting call for papers from Ecozon@…
Call for Papers: Ecozon@ Issue 4.1 (Spring 2013)
Green Countercultures
Guest Editor: Peter Mortensen, Aarhus University
From the late 1950s to the early 1970s an extraordinary counterculture emerged among young people in various western countries, opposing the values of mainstream society. The counterculture originated in a protest again Cold War moralism, conservatism and consumerism, and it was later galvanized by opposition to ethnic discrimination and the US war in Vietnam.
Posted in Eco-culture | 3 Comments »