Here are a few thoughts after watching Frontline’s Revolution in Cairo, which is a very good 24-minute summary of how this particular democratic moment occurred, and after reading Badiou‘s, Hardt & Negri’s, Hallward‘s, Amit Rai‘s, and some other takes on the events.
Tools + Techniques + Events + Vision = The revolution(s) we’ve been witnessing
The first three, in the Egyptian instance, are pretty easy to identify (click on the links). To oversimplify just a little, they are Continue Reading »
Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged Badiou, Egypt, media, nonviolence, Obama, Politics, revolution | 2 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 to say speculatively realist.
One little point: Process-relational philosophies have long been speculative and realist. And many of these (along with a lot of ecophilosophy of the last 25 years) reject the centrality of the human-world “correlation,” just as Quentin Meillassoux did in his 2006 book that has been so influential for the Speculative Realists (caps intended).* Whitehead’s Process and Reality is perhaps the most obvious modern example of a speculative metaphysic that is realist through and through, but there have been plenty of others. Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged correlationism, ethics, Meillassoux, philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 7 Comments »
Quick, name five genius scientists and inventors…
Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison.
All vegetarians? Of course. Elephant journal includes five others on its list.
How about philosophers and cultural innovators? Pythagoras, Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha, Leo Tolstoy, Marsilio Ficino, Plato by some accounts… See here for a longer list.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
To the USA, perhaps… But mostly neither here nor there…
Posted in Academe, Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, Politics, Visual culture | Leave a Comment »
The New York Times has a couple of nice pieces on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions: an interactive account of the key events and a more detailed piece outlining the role of the different protest groups, bloggers and Facebook-ites, nonviolent resistance tactics, and the Obama administration.
A few quick thoughts:
1) Max Forte is right about the U.S.’s equivocation, its policy of “hedging its bets” in a mix of realism and opportunism.
Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged Egypt, multitude, posthegemony, revolutions | 3 Comments »
I enjoyed Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I’m glad to see that it bears re-viewing.
As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a London trash heap (above) is the most brilliantly conceived segment, and one gets to hear the full (and in its own way brilliant) incoherence of his position on the topic. “The true ecological attitude is to hate the world: less love, more hatred,” as he puts it in the full interview (available in the book-of-the-film, p. 180).
Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture | Tagged ecology, film, Morton, nature, philosophy, Zizek | 6 Comments »
The fuss over Survival International’s “uncontacted tribes” (see my earlier piece) hasn’t ceased — the Huffington Post and others continue to spread the original news largely uncritically. (William at the excellent Integral Options Cafe shared that news, but has now kindly amended his post in response to my own comment regarding it.)
Now Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology has stepped in to clarify things in much greater detail than I could possibly have done. His ‘The last free people on the planet’ is a very well balanced and informative summary which, while it raises the question of what it means to be “free” and especially “last,” renders the issue much more understandable.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Amazon, Decolonization, Fourth World, indigenous, uncontacted tribes | Leave a Comment »
Jussi Parikka at Machinology is reporting on media theorist Mark Hansen’s move from a focus on media objects to a Whiteheadian focus on media processes.
A few quotes:
“Well known are the Whitehead writings of Massumi and Manning in Montreal, and of course the recent Whitehead writings of Steven Shaviro, the debates around object oriented philosophy that take a lot aboard from Whitehead, and naturally the ideas of such pioneers as Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour. So Hansen as well has joined this crew enthusiastic about the superject instead of subject, and the distributed field of prehensions instead of the primacy of the human body and sensory system as the focal point in aesthetics.” [. . .]
“When Shaviro asked the question of how would contemporary cultural theory look like if we had focused more on Whitehead, instead of Heidegger as the 20th century philosopher, Hansen seems to ask: how could we bend Whitehead into a media theorist? [. . .] For Hansen, the key point is how Whitehead’s perspective affords us to think about nonperceptual sensation. It gives agency to the environment instead of the focal subject effected and affected by that environment, and offers the perspective of the superject for media theory: how the individual is the end result of the environmental datum prehended by this focal point.”
While I deal more with cinema and less with trans-media networks (etc.), my use of Whitehead in Ecologies of the Moving Image is very consistent with this shift. Glad to be sharing this train with so much respectable company.
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy | Tagged Whitehead | 3 Comments »
The “integralists” have waded into the climate change debate with an impressive looking article entitled An Ontology of Climate Change: Integral Pluralism and the Enactment of Multiple Objects (click for an excerpt). It’s by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, one half of the duo that authored the mammoth Integral Ecology. (The other half is Heideggerian-turned-Wilberian ecophilosopher Michael Zimmerman, author of what for a time had been the best overview of radical ecophilosophy available.)
I’ve ordered a copy of the paper and will have more to say once I’ve read it. But I like the way Esbjorn-Hargens weaves in a number of strands of post-constructivist thought, including the actor-network/cosmopolitical approaches of Latour, Law, and Mol, and the enactive cognitivism of Varela and Thompson. His notion of climate change as a “multiple object” would appear to suggest a resonance with object-oriented ontology. This bodes well for ecophilosophical dialogue with a school (“integral philosophy”) that has remained a bit aloof from others, mainly because of the baggage accrued to its founder, Ken Wilber. I’m looking forward to that dialogue.
That reminds me: I once suggested a group cross-blog read of Integral Ecology. If anyone else is interested, chime in. I won’t lead it, due to other commitments, but I’d happily participate. There are copies on Amazon for around $20.
Posted in Climate change, Philosophy | 8 Comments »
