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the attractions of process (metaphysics)

December 9, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 of thought, one could be forgiven for thinking we might be on the verge of a big philosophical group hug. That said, there remains much to chew on in these developments, and I think (and hope) that many of those involved will be doing that for some time to come. Several of the Claremont talks are now available online in one form or another: Ian Bogost’s paper is here, Steven Shaviro’s can be found here, Isabelle Stengers’ talk and Donna Haraway’s response have been shared here (on a wonderful new blog that not only shares many common interests with this blog, but uses the same WordPress theme, sans my background image), and Graham Harman live-blogged it all here.

Having now caught up with at least some of these, I want to throw out a few quick thoughts of my own on what makes a process-relational philosophical perspective not superior, but just very attractive, to me and I believe to others. It’s one of the pieces of process philosophy that I think is worth remembering in all these debates, and a reason why I believe that Whitehead’s re-entry into philosophical discourse (outside of the milieu of hardcore Whiteheadians) marks a significant shift in philosophy today.

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , | 26 Comments »

conversions & convertibles

December 5, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

(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 in a much warmer embrace of object-oriented ontology. The latter has now become, for Chris, a “fellow-traveller,” a compatible and friendly sparring partner at the very least, and certainly no longer an opponent. The difference between OOO and the process-relational views Chris, Steve Shaviro, I, and others have espoused is not one of radical incommensurability but one of emphasis, language, and not much more (as I’ve said myself, for instance here.)

In a series of two posts, Chris announces that change of heart — in terms that remind me a little of Tim Morton’s actual conversion on the road to Damascus — and then fleshes out the main differences and how they are collapsing. What follow are my initial thoughts on Chris’s posts. I’ll be out of commission for the rest of the day and most of tomorrow, and these thoughts are written quickly and imperfectly.

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments »

planetary alignment in Claremont?

December 4, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

For anyone interested in the growing dialogue between Whiteheadian process philosophy and post-Continental metaphysical realism — a dialogue that, in my view, is at the philosophical cutting edge for ecological thinking — the Claremont conference seems as good as it gets, perhaps even a turning point. The dialogue between hard-core Whiteheadians like Roland Faber and Judith Jones (whose Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology I highly recommend) with Whitehead-inspired cultural/science theorists (Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Steven Shaviro) and Speculative Realists (Harman, Bryant, Bogost, et al.) is the philosophical equivalent of a rare planetary configuration.

Unfortunately, with a partner going into labor in a matter of weeks, I couldn’t travel this month, so I’m very grateful to Graham Harman for sharing such detailed notes on it: they are all collected on his live-blog from Claremont. A few of these Whitehead conferences have resulted in books, and I hope this one produces something as well. But with all the blogging going on in and around it — thanks largely to the Speculative Realists — books may even to too old-school… too slow a format. We’ll see what happens.

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welcome to immanence 2.0

December 3, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This is the new, improved version of Immanence. If you came here from the old one and had been a feed subscriber, blogroll linker, or just a regular reader of that one, I would love it if you’d do the same here. I’ll still be tweaking things here and there for a while as I get accustomed to the possibilities of WordPress. Let me know your thoughts about the new design and format.

The design, by the way, combines 85ideas’s Motion theme (see bottom of this page) with an image worked over by the magicianly hands of Ines Berrizbeitia, from a photo I took many years ago on Graham Island, Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the northwest coast of British Columbia). Ines’s creativity and craft, along with her patience (working with a finicky art director looking over her shoulder), are immensely appreciated. You can visit her web design page here.

Posted in Blog stuff, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

fast thought at Claremont

December 2, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s UCLA summit on speculative realism, which Tim Morton has been podcasting with relentless (and admirable) abandon, Graham Harman is now at Claremont and appears to be live-blogging the Whitehead conference:

Stengers keynote in progress

Donna Haraway response to Stengers.

And follow it live at his blog.

From patient and deliberate thinking and slow writing, philosophy has become a live, blazingly high-speed (and partly vicarious) art form. Fantastic. If the production of concepts continues to speed up, we will need the philosophical equivalent of a slow-food movement. (That is, if we don’t ascend into some transconceptual hyperspace.) A slow thought movement. But for now, eyelids pressed to our screens and neurons firing, we enjoy.

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gleanings

December 2, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

(findings, briefings, reports, call them what you will… I’m in an Agnes Varda mood, which is helping me deal with the loss of several weeks of gleanings in the hard drive crash that will define my life as “before 11/20/10” and “after” it)

Scientists found that Asian and American brains respond completely differently when faced with images of dominance and submission, and when evaluating character traits of themselves as opposed to other people. Asians and Americans gathered with other world leaders to fiddle at a Mexican resort while buildings burned. (Some Americans stayed away. Activists grew distressed.) Hermetic libraries began giving off their own whiff of smoke amidst the dust. Google added trees and climate prognoses to the digital Earth. James Cameron tried to add a whole forest. U.S. corporations, meanwhile, gave thanks for their record profits.

Irish humanities academics called upon Irish humanities academics to help save the country’s sinking economic ship. Worldchangers sadly jumped their own ship, with barely a whimper. Anthropologists convening in the shipwrecked city of New Orleans slugged it out over whether or not they were scientists. Graham Harman and Steven Shaviro got ready to slug it out in the middleweight neo-realist philosopher category of the international thought-wrestling society. (The heavyweights are mostly dead, though their thoughts persist, and a few of them linger on.) A heavyweight of another kind, Chalmers Johnson swam away from it all quietly.

(More on the Harman-Shaviro showdown, as well as other object-relational matters, soon. And of course I’m being facetious with my terms here. Both are great intellectual role models, among the best and most public and genuine of the new breed of philosopher-metaphysicians, and I eagerly await the results of their deliberations. You all know which of them I agree with more, but the debate has been truly invigorating, and has been the main cause of my own interloper’s slide into philosophy sui generis – or so I hope that it’s generis. Wish I could be there at the Whitehead conference.)

Posted in Climate change, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

the model (Peirce+Whitehead): films, dogs, worlds

December 2, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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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.

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Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

those potent French narcotics…

November 29, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Himanshu at Doxic Shock shares a couple of great Latourisms… The details may be past their expiry dates (the generalities less so), but they’re still pretty funny.*

For a French person, saying that facts are constructed is a banality. Relativism is like an infantile disease: for us, who contract it in our high school philosophy class when we are 18, it is harmless. Yet, when it is transferred to the US, it can infect entire departments of philosophy and literature.

[France is a] new Columbia, a land of dealers producing hard drugs (‘derridium’, ‘lacanium’) to which graduate students on American campuses cannot resist any better than crack.

(The first is apparently a quote from Nathalie Levisalles, “Le Canular du Profesor Sokal,” Liberation, December 3, 1996; the second from Latour’s “Y a-t-il une Science apres la Guerre Froide?”)

Now if only actor-network theory had spread as quickly as the others… But it’s a Franco-Anglo hybrid – do they reproduce? And what happens when its pushers keep changing its street name and the color of the pill? (Latour keeps modifying his; John Law has completely shed ANT in favor of heterogeneities and other such things; and now this transmogrification by Harman…) Ah, but then it’s that much harder to resist!

(For the record, I’m a user… Been one for a long time 🙂

*Originally this post was titled “those good French drugs,” then “those sweet French drugs.” They are more like potions, love potions… Potent potions.

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cinema as Prospero’s organic machine

November 28, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

Chapter Three is the longest chapter in the book, featuring theoretical discussion as well as analysis of emblematic films by directors including John Ford (The Searchers), Alexander Dovzhenko (Earth), Pare Lorentz (The River), Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider), Michelangelo Antonioni, Stan Brakhage, Jia Zhang-Ke, and Peter Greenaway. The excerpt below comes at the chapter’s end. One of the central conceits of the book is that film constitutes a journey into a film-world, a cinematic Zone, a world defined by the three dimensions mentioned (geomorphism, anthropomorphism, biomorphism), and that the film-experience is a specific viewer’s negotiation of the lures offered by a film to be drawn into that film’s film-world. The two films discussed below provide different variations of that journey into the Zone of cinema.

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Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged | 3 Comments »

manuscript update

November 24, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m recovering from a hard drive crash that occurred late last week. The only significant part of Ecologies of the Moving Image that I’ve completely lost are some fairly substantial recent revisions and additions to Chapter Six. I can reconstruct other pieces from earlier saves and from revisions made on hard copy print-outs. The crash will slow me down, but I still expect to complete the book by the end of December. Here’s a progress report…

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Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Philosophy | Tagged | 3 Comments »

261 millionnaires in Congress

November 22, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

No comment.

(Except this.)

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puppets & mediums in the battle over Amerika

November 20, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Jon Stewart does Glenn Beck (again), spinning his George-Soros-as-Darth-Vader routine to its logical culmination… “Only Rupert Murdoch” — well, with this ragtag bunch of conservative billionnaires, media organizations, PACs, et al. — “stands between George Soros and Amerika.” This is laugh-(or-cry)-out-loud hilarious.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Or watch the whole episode at the Daily Show web site.

And yes, Fox News chairman Ailes actually did say that National Public Radio “are, of course, Nazis.” Bill McKibben provides a more reasoned assessment of public radio here in the New York Review of Books — the same issue that has Soros chiming in on Obama’s economic missteps, Diane Ravitch effectively shredding the Davis Guggenheim pro-charter schools film Waiting for “Superman,” and Anne Applebaum reviewing Tim Snyder’s excellent Bloodlands (which has little to do with America except for the historical ground-truthing it provides on the more bizarre expressions of this current culture war — like Ailes’s “Nazis”).

The new issue, meanwhile, includes a thoughtful piece by Mark Lilla on that same Beck of Revelation. Searching for the “real” Glenn Beck, Lilla argues, “makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are.” It’s this that distinguishes Beck from his Fox confreres: “Rush Limbaugh plays the loud, steamrolling uncle you avoid at Thanksgiving. Bill O’Reilly is the angry guy haranguing the bartender. Sean Hannity is the football captain in a letter sweater, asking you to repeat everything, slowly. But with Glenn Beck you never know what you’ll get. He is a perpetual work in progress, a billboard offering YOUR MESSAGE HERE.” There’s a lot to that characterization.

Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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