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Agreements & productive differences

December 13, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Levi Bryant has proposed a ceasefire on the objects/relations debate, and followed that up with a nice post calling for self-moderation of our more confrontational urges and for a more affirmative writing (and blogging) style that would render the form of our writing more consonant with its content. I’m all for the latter; it’s something I try to practice when I’m not too overcome by impatience (which is easy to get in the heatedness of online exchanges like these). As for a ceasefire, we aren’t of course at war, but stepping back and holding our metaphorical fire makes sense, and could even be timely given the agreements that Levi and I, at least, seem to have reached (which I’ll spell out in a moment). It’s become clear to me over the last year and a half or so of discussions with Levi that while he responds to things heatedly, he always comes back in friendly and generous demeanor, and I value that quality in him.

As for those points of agreement — anyone wanting to trace how these arose can read backwards from his reply to my comment to his reply to my reply to his reply to Chris’s replies to our replies to each other, probably starting with my attractions of process post (!!) — they are these:

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , | 10 Comments »

Being knowing, knowing being

December 12, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The debate between relational and objectological variants of speculative realism (for lack of a better characterization) has taken another of its more frenetic turns, which is both frustrating and promising — frustrating because it tends to descend into personally directed pejoratives when it does that, and because, as Steve Shaviro suggests, it seems to go around in circles, but promising because there are glimmers of helpful insight that arise in the process. At the risk of getting drawn in further, I will try to clarify one of those glimmers here.

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

immanence seeks poetry editor

December 10, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

With its migration and re-emergence on a new (and improved) server, it’s a good time for this blog to diversify and transubstantiate, like water into a good Mediterranean wine.

To that end, Immanence seeks a poetry editor, someone to collect and/or produce textual and visual poetry as an accompaniment and countercurrent to what appears on the blog already. Contributors in general are also welcome: writers, textual poachers, and creative artists interested in the interfaces between ecology, culture, philosophy, and media. (See the Categories up above for a more complete list of the content areas. “Poetry” can and should be added to it. The blog’s mission statement is here, but it can evolve, as all good things do.)

I’ll be taking some release time from the blog in the near future, and I’d be thrilled to have guest contributors and/or co-editors. If you’ve liked what you’ve read here and would like to join the conversation, as a contributor and not just a commenter, please write me to let me know.

As for what’s in it for you… A new audience? Joy? The irrepressible lightness of being immanent?

Posted in Blog stuff | 2 Comments »

mediation arrives…

December 10, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Michael at Archive Fire has been doing an excellent job summarizing and, at times, mediating between Levi, Bogost, and myself (and others). See, e.g., here, here, and here. He’s genuinely trying to see the best of both perspectives and to weave them into some concordance. Paragraphs like the following, which reframes  the discussion over life and the mouse in space, are particularly useful:

In this case, ‘life’ is not just a “quality”, or “singularity”, it is an emergent property embodied in the mouse’s extensive and intensive constitution – a constitution, or composition, or assemblage that is intrinsically processual, temporal and always existing in relation. Whatever ‘withdrawness’ an entity has it has by virtue of its structural depth – its embodied ‘local’ (which is actually co-local) complexity.

Very well put.

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repetition with (slight) difference

December 10, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Just a few quick responses to Levi Bryant. Levi writes:

1) entities are nonetheless patterned or structured despite their becoming, 2) they are unities, and 3) they cannot be submerged in or exhausted by their relations. Relations can always be detached. Objects can always enter into new relations. [. . .] if you hold that entities are constituted by their relations then you lose that excess by which it is possible to account for how anything new can enter the world.

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

and anyway…

December 9, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Process-relational and object-oriented philosophers, as far as I can tell, share the idea that things have an interiority, a “one’s own-ness,” that is not accessible to others in the way that it is to oneself. We can argue about where that interiority is located — whether in one’s experience (which is where we access it, for PRists) or somewhere more withdrawn than that, and maybe even inaccessible to one’s own experience; and whether it’s what withdraws from relations (as it seems to be for OOOists), or what enacts relations (as it is for PRists). And we can argue about what possesses it — whether only active unities (Whiteheadian “actual occasions” and “societies”) or aggregates of all kinds (rocks, discarded snakeskins, toothpicks and shopping carts, etc.). But that’s a significant agreement.

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Posted in Philosophy | 4 Comments »

the mouse

December 9, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Okay, I’ll post this here as well. (Why confuse people?)

I feel like I’ve stepped into a hornet’s nest. My last post had three goals, and three main points:

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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.

Posted in Philosophy | 4 Comments »

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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