Bonnitta Roy’s article “A Process Model of Integral Theory” (pdf) in the December 2006 issue of Integral Review is a thought-provoking attempt to advance post-metaphysical integral theory further toward process thought and Dzogchen Buddhism (what better combination?). Continue Reading »
Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking With Whitehead arrived in the mail today. The publication of the English translation of this tome, a long nine years after the French original, is a genuine Event in the world of process-relational philosophy (or whatever you’d like to name the “beatnik brotherhood,” as Harman calls it, of philosophers of immanence and becoming — a brother/sisterhood that Harman asserts does not constitute a counter-current to the hegemonic alliance of philosophies of essence, substance, and onto-theological transcendence, but that Deleuzians and others would like to think does).
The artist of sublime faith (of the pantheistic, immanent kind) versus the artist of sublime cynicism. “Earth is heaven (and purgatory)” versus “Earth is evil.” With catastrophe and Kubrick’s 2001 lurking in the background of both…
Working through the last decade or so of Wilberian integral theory (which I’m doing in preparation for the upcoming group reading of Integral Ecology) is no small challenge.
Ken Wilber’s been an incredibly prolific writer, publishing scores of books over the last 15 years in addition to scattered shorter materials of various kinds, including new forewords and revisions of older works (in his eight-volume Collected Works series), summaries, interviews (including auto-interviews), several hundred pages of manuscript materials from work in progress, and much more. Beyond that, there is a virtual industry of commentary, discussion, critical evaluation, application, and revision of his work by followers and detractors alike — most of which, fortunately, is readily found online.
Incidentally, if there’s a single small book I’d recommend on life from this kind of perspective, it’s Daniel Stern’s Diary of a Baby. Stern was a favorite of Felix Guattari’s. That book can be followed up by the more scholarly The Interpersonal World of the Infant; make sure you read the introduction from the 2000 edition, which updates the 1985 original. Stern’s The Present Moment and Forms of Vitality are in the same vein, and very relevant to a process-relational perspective on the human life.
And while I’m at recommending books on infancy, Alison Gopnik’s Philosophical Baby and Meredith Small’s Our Babies Ourselves are the other ones I’ve been consulting, in those rare moments of spare time.
In defiance of the idea that Nature — the thing, or the idea (capitalized or not), or both — is either dead or unnecessary, I feel like posting some favorite passages from “Nature Alive,” the second of A. N. Whitehead’s two 1933 lectures on nature, published in Modes of Thought (1938/1968), which you can read the full text of online.
Whatever one may think of Brian Leiter as a philosopher (and I have no strong opinions, not having read any of his books), he has to be commended for having what may be the best philosopher’s blog for conversations on yesterday’s Canadian election.
The comments on this previous post resulted in my doing a bit of quick research (methodology: googling) on how often the terms “constructivism” and “constructionism” get used in relation to certain theorists and theoretical terms.
Here are the results. I’ve put the “winning” terms in bold:
Chris Vitale at Networkologies has a great series going on Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books. It’s rich with insights and video clips. It starts here and continues for several lengthy posts. Or scroll down the right here to the “Mini-Essays” links on “Reading Deleuze’s Cinema Books.”
I’d like to call a moratorium on the use of the word “constructivism” (or “constructionism”) to refer only to social constructivism.
(This post was prompted by Tim Morton’s Object-Oriented Strategies for Ecological Art, but his point there is somewhat differently directed and mine addresses a more general issue that can still be found in a lot of writing in social and ecological theory, and which concerns what’s at stake when we speak of “constructivism.”)
Here’s a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the film in its relationship to its social and material contexts, including that of the Chernobyl accident, which occurred seven years after the film was released, but which the film might just have anticipated.