New Scientist has a nice article (“Searching for meanings in a meadow“) on the state of the field of biosemiotics, which I’ve mentioned here on a number of occasions (e.g., here and, in passing, here).
The new Springer anthology Essential Readings in Biosemiotics looks like a very good overview of all things biosemiotic. The 77-page introduction by Donald Favareau can be read online here or downloaded as PDF file from this page. I highly recommend it.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged biosemiotics | Leave a Comment »
One of the challenges of blogging is that, if one is to do it respectfully and well, one must be prepared to respond to one’s critics, and in such a high-speed medium this can lead to a pace that is unsustainable over time. The coming days won’t allow me much time for such exchanges, but I feel that Levi Bryant’s response to my last post calls at least for addressing a few apparent misunderstandings.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged object-oriented philosophy | Leave a Comment »
In response to my last post, Levi is arguing, as Graham has before, that relational ontologies have had their day, that “it is relational and processual thought that has become a habit that prevents us from thinking, not object-oriented thought,” and that “For the last century we’ve repeatedly said ‘things are related’ to such a degree that claims about interdependence, relation, and interconnection have lost a good deal of meaning” and “become stale metaphors and worn coins.” He continues:
“Rather than beginning with relation, context, interdependence, interconnection, etc., what would we learn if we instead thought of autonomous objects perpetually shifting and jumping between relations? My wager is that this would teach us a great deal more in the ecological framework than endless talk of holism and relation. We would begin to ask how substances perturb networks, rather than treating networks as static and fixed systems where all is harmonious and balanced as we tend to do now.”
It’s true that there is a popular view of ecology as positing systems that are, ideally, “harmonious and balanced.” (We might call this the Disney Lion King version of reality.) Ecologists themselves used to speak about certain kinds of networks (ecosystemic “climax communities”) that way in the 1920s and 1930s, and in some cases up to the 1960s or so. Some environmentalists still use those tropes on occasion today. But if everything actually was “harmonious and balanced,” would there be any need for environmentalism at all, since there’d be no need to concern oneself with re-establishing some modicum of “harmony and balance”?
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead | 19 Comments »
Not having followed the Derrida debates too closely (and doing it mostly from the comfort of my Google blog reader when I have), I’ve been missing the fascinating debates going on in the comments sections of Levi’s posts. Like this one on realism (72 comments) or this one on dialogue (93 comments). Larval Subjects deserves some kind of award for generating such prolific and thoughtful discussion (not just heat, as they say, but light, too).
I’ve also been thinking that I should divide this blog into separate Philosophy and Eco/Media/Culture sections, if only because the GeoPhilosophy subheading has gotten so much more usage recently than most of the others. I’ve been toying with a new format (as Kvond prematurely announced a little while ago – I appreciated the mention, but wasn’t quite ready to go public yet), and I may reorganize it along those lines if and when I make the jump to WordPress. Here’s a working version of the new format from a little while ago. I haven’t touched it since then, and that version requires some fairly obvious tweaking (to say the least). If anyone has thoughts about it, i.e., whether it’s better or worse than the current Immanence, let me know.
Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy | 1 Comment »
I haven’t wanted to tread into the recent Speculative Realist debates over Derrida, in part because I haven’t had time for them (and my internet access has been a little unreliable), but in part also because I think they’re mostly reiterating themes that have already been well covered. OOO makes a valid and important point about Continental philosophy’s overall neglect of the nonhuman world, but it pushes too hard with its Meillassouxian critique of correlationism, which I don’t think ultimately holds up. (That’s a much larger topic than I want to get into here, but it should be enough to say that I think I agree with Chris Vitale’s Whiteheadian “absolutization of the correlation, with a multiplicitous twist.“)
And of course, as Graham and Levi argue, Derrida wrote mostly about texts. But he also wrote about death, mourning, friendship, cats, politics, and many other things, either directly or by way of texts about those things. Derrida’s defenders are right to defend him from the “correlationist” charge insofar as he did, at least in his later work, address the nonhuman world (animals) in innovative and useful ways, and insofar as his ideas lend themselves well to “non-correlationist” uses. But that doesn’t get most Derrideans (except those like Calarco) off the hook for what they haven’t done – which is OOO’s point.
All that aside, the recent exchange between Chris, Levi, and Graham has piqued my interest. In fact, Levi’s and Graham’s point about there being a “real Paris” is one I can almost get myself comfortably on board with — and I think that Chris could, too, if the terms of the exchange were made a little clearer. Here’s what I mean, and why the hesitant “almost”…
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Derrida, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
Just had to share this.
Hat tip to Reconciliation Ecology.
Posted in Politics | Tagged Jon Stewart, Politics | Leave a Comment »
What a lovely, touching post Tim Morton has written about his conversion to object-oriented ontology. Since my days of doing religious-studies fieldwork, I’ve always gotten ripples of that nameless mixture of joy, pleasure, and sad melancholy — that feeling of being existentially touched, even pierced — whenever I’ve been around people undergoing conversion experiences (whether they were rolling around on the floor during the Toronto Airport ‘Blessing’, or doing Stan Grof’s LSD-without-the-LSD holotropic breathwork). There’s something about the quality of being around someone who’s undergoing radical, life-changing shifts (or what seem that way at the moment) in their understanding, feeling, appreciation, sensibility, and state of consciousness all at once, which is what religious conversion amounts to. It doesn’t matter that I don’t share their conviction, or may not have any overlap with it at all; I can still relate to that piercedness, that sense of being throttled to the core and finding realignment from the bottom up. (Funny that my fingers keep wanting to spell that word “peircedness“…)
What I like about Tim’s note is the upfrontness by which intellectual conversion is acknowledged as religious in nature (though he doesn’t use that term per se). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong, and probably central, intellectual component to it; but it’s religious because it’s more than just intellectual. Conversion, at one and the same time, brings sudden comfort — the comfort of having “arrived home,” without having even known that one was away — and a radical transvaluation that involves a feeling of total openness and vulnerability, a stripping of the self to only the naked essentials, the things that really matter.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged eventology, religion | 1 Comment »
I’ve been studiously avoiding reviews of Inception, Christopher Nolan’s new metaphysical heist thriller, wanting to see it for myself (intrigued by its premise) before I start to see it through other people’s eyes. Today I saw it, and I’ve now scanned some of the reviews and a bit of blog commentary (see links at bottom).
With films as complex as this, I tend to reserve judgment for a while as I let myself process them, consciously and otherwise. But one of the ways I process them is by letting myself be guided by their apparent visceral effects on me (which is consistent with a process-relational understanding of cinema, i.e. understanding films in terms of the relational processes they set in motion). So the following comments are still largely unprocessed, or rather they’re very much in the process of being processed.
Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought, Visual culture | Tagged imagination, memory | 8 Comments »
The first issue of SPECULATIONS is out. Details, including downloading instructions, are available here. There’s a lot of good material in the issue, and it’s a very promising start. Congrats to Paul Ennis for pulling it together, and Thomas Gokey for the lovely design.
Posted in Philosophy | 3 Comments »
Two stark facts about our world, from yesterday’s news:
(1) that a single man can be paid $1.84 billion dollars, as the Wall Street Journal announced yesterday — that’s 1,840 million dollars — over the last ten years of careening capitalism,
(2) and that this doesn’t strike enough people as an obscenity to be labeled as such on the front page of newspapers around the world. (Compare the 109 news articles about it with the thousands devoted to other topics.)
Couldn’t a single million have been enough reward? But almost two thousand of them, all to one guy? Did he contribute 4000 times in value to the world what the average American farmer contributed (and well over a million times the average non-U.S. farmer)?
This tops all the figures I’ve previously seen for CEO pay (which have gotten up to $100 million or so a year, and therefore $1 billion over a decade). Here’s the reigning top ten. And these are just the CEOs, not the self-made gazillionnaires but the corporate execs.
Exam question: Does this mean that (a) we are all in the same boat, but we (or capitalism) just don’t know it? Or that (b) some of us are in various sized boats (a few on yachts the size of the Titanic), while others are just treading water for as long as we can?
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »
… but only momentarily, from my writing (mainly Ecologies of the Moving Image, which continues to proceed apace, but also the Praxis Forum I’m editing on the Ken Burns National Parks series for Environmental Communication, the paper I’ve been invited to give on green pilgrimage at the Fourth Compostela Colloquium, and the piece I’m writing for Bryant’s and Bogost’s collection, which is shaping up to be quite the anthology, now featuring Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Katherine Hayles, and Tim Morton alongside the previously announced names — OOO continues to widen its sphere of influence, now moving into science studies and feminist theory).
I’ve recently transitioned from a PC (a Dell Latitude that I had really come to like, despite its PC-ish flaws) to a new MacBook Pro, which initially threw me for some loops — the display, for one thing, was so much smaller and less detailed. (It’s a smaller machine.) But I’ve come to like it a lot over the last two weeks.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere: There’ve been some very interesting discussions over at Larval Subjects, Aberrant Monism, Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere (about Isabelle Stengers, Latour, and Owen Barfield, among others), which you can catch in the Shared Items on my Shadow Blog (scroll down on the right; and note that they aren’t in chronological order, because my following of them has not been very systematic recently). And Grist has continued being the best go-to place for environmental news; see, for instance, Joe Romm’s lament about the Obama admin’s increasingly disappointing record. And see Cog Pol Works on right-wing conspiracy theories around the BP disaster, and Mediaology and Wired on the (hilarious!) dangers of ambient music.
A couple of important conference announcements: Staging Sustainability and the Fourth Whitehead Research Project conference, which features an all-star lineup (and which I, unfortunately, will not be able to attend).
Heading back down (like the loons on the lake here, suddenly disappearing to look for some fish, and reappearing a while later somewhere else)…
Posted in Blog stuff | 3 Comments »
It’s been slow here because I am hard at work on the manuscript of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which I had hoped to finish this summer. The first three chapters are complete or close to it; the last three and final epilogue are in various stages of semi-completion. Until they are complete, blogging may continue to be slow. (And the current heat wave, hitting 90+ F. (30s C.) temperatures in Vermont’s Green Mountains, and encouraging swimming rather than writing, doesn’t help.) Here’s a little information about the book. (This has been slightly modified from the original post, to clarify a few things.)
There are six chapters, a brief Foreword, and a brief-to-medium length Epilogue. Chapter titles, at the moment, are as follows:
1. Introduction: Journeys into the Zone of Cinema
2. Ecologies, Morphologies, Semiosics: A Process-Relational Model of Cinema
3. Territorialities: The Geomorphology of the Visible
4. Encounters: First Contact, Utopia, & the Ethnographic Impulse
5. Anima Moralia: The Ethics of Perception
6. Terra, Trauma, & the Geopolitics of the Real
Epilogue: Digital Life in a Biosemiotic World
As the Introduction suggests, the journey metaphor looms prominently in the book. This is because I conceptualize the cinematic experience as a journey into cinema worlds. The book presents a philosophy — specifically an ecophilosophy — of the cinema. It brings a “process-relational” approach (indebted to Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others) to three sets of relational processes: (1) the constitution, becoming, or “worlding” of film-worlds themselves (conceived as morphogenetic processes), (2) the processes by which viewers are drawn into film-worlds, and (3) cinema’s interaction with the extra-cinematic earth-world.
Each of these is a triad, conceived more or less along the lines of Peirce’s categories. With the film-world (#1), there is its geomorphism, the givenness of its objectscapes; there is the biomorphism of its interperceptual dynamics, which include the seeing/hearing/feeling that is at the heart of cinema (i.e., its relational event-ness); and there is the anthropomorphism, by which agency, the capacity to act, is distributed within the film-world. With the film-event (#2), there is its spectacle, its immediate, shimmering ‘thisness’ and ‘thereness’; there is its narrativity, which weaves us into its causal-effective web as it surges forward in time; and there is the semiosic productivity or signness of the meanings that proliferate out of the encounter between us — with our prior experiences, expectations, desires, and so on — and the film. And with the earth-world (#3), there are its material ecologies (for which cinema is a material process), its perceptual ecologies (for which it is a perceptual process), and its social ecologies (for which it is a social process).
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged film, Peirce | 7 Comments »
