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.
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 »
Governments (in this case, it was the Conservative federal government of Stephen Harper) like to host these big international gatherings; they think it builds their national and international prestige. Police like to provide the security for them; they get lots of $ for new toys and great opportunities to try them out. Protestors like, or feel they need, to demonstrate that the gathered political elites are corruptly entwined with economic elites and are not responsive to the needs of the people they are supposed to represent. (It helps them organize themselves collectively and define their political identities individually; let’s call it citizenship.) A tiny fraction of those protestors (whom we’ll call the Black Bloc) like, and probably love, to make that point dramatically, so as to “smash capitalism,” on the hypothesis that the more smashing that occurs, the more everybody will wake up to the necessity for more smashing.
Police like to have enemies – it makes their job easier – so they infiltrate the protestors, including the tiny fraction, and egg them on (in this case to burn a police car and smash some shop windows). This gives them justification for their efforts (and the $ they got). The media has a feeding frenzy; they love to have feeding frenzies. The police and feds say “we told you so,” which they love to do (who doesn’t?).
Evidence accumulates that the police not only overstepped reasonable boundaries but that they instigated some, and maybe a lot, of the violence. (The jury’s still out on the agent-provocateur hypothesis, but it’s important to have people connecting these kinds of dots.) People protest (which they don’t generally love to do; it’s more work than complaining). Public pressure builds. The police chief resigns in disgrace. The feds get booted out in the next election. Another government replaces them. (Hmm… then what?)
Posted in Politics | Tagged alter-globalism, G-20, globalization, protest | 1 Comment »
It’s very nice to see that philosopher and Deleuzian/Spinozist Jeffrey Bell has joined the blogosphere, with a set of very interesting posts up already. Graham Harman has been providing more useful writing tips, here and here. William Connolly has been posting to the impressive group blog The Contemporary Condition. Levi has been posting about flat ontology and flat ethics and about Whitehead’s relation to Levi’s onticology (with a bit of an exchange between myself and him in the comments). Andrew Ray has been posting some wonderful stuff on film/art and placescapes. Tim Morton and Ben Woodard are launching a very promising new journal called Thinking Nature.
Most of these things I’ve shared on my shared items page, visible here as the running list of items you see on the right-hand column of this blog’s main web page. You can subscribe to that from GoogleReader (or just choose to “follow me” there, which I suspect includes my occasional comments and “likes”).
I’ve been working on a new WordPress version of this blog, but haven’t quite gotten it ready. When it’s all set, I’ll give readers a chance to vote on whether to keep this one or opt for the new one (though you can sneak a glance at it here, and feel free to let me know if you think it’s worth the change or not).
In the meantime, I’ll be blogging less as I’m working hard on the last three chapters of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which I suspect will be one of the first books that could legitimately call itself “an ecophilosophy of the cinema.” The proximity of Caspian Lake in Greensboro, Vermont (longtime summer home of Wallace Stegner), is helping with the writing. Perhaps I’ll post a photo at some point.
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I’m just catching up with this interesting exchange between Gary Williams (Minds and Brains), Graham Harman, and Tom Sparrow (Plastic Bodies). Williams takes issue with Harman’s and others’ portrayal of Speculative Realism as “revolutionary.” “The narrative of ‘finally’ moving beyond the ‘Kantian nightmare'”, he writes, “is tired and overplayed.” He argues that it’s not a big revelation that there is a world that’s independent of human minds. In reply, Harman and Sparrow defend the Speculative Realists’ originality and claim that Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others did not sufficiently break with Kantian “correlationism.”
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Merleau-Ponty, Ontology, epistemology, realism, speculative realism, Whitehead | 4 Comments »
Glancing through a recent issue of the journal Subjectivity, I noticed that their very first issue — an impressive debut that featured an all-star cast of relational thinkers including Isabelle Stengers, Annemarie Mol, and Nigel Thrift — is freely available online (to non-subscribers). The issue also included an article by Paul Stenner that provides an unusually lucid articulation of Whiteheadian process philosophy in the context of debates about “subjectivity.”
It’s worth sharing Stenner’s 14-point description of “actual occasions,” which is Whitehead’s term for the most fundamental-level events, the process-relational building blocks of the universe (to use a mechanistic metaphor for something that’s the opposite of mechanism). While it’s full of Whiteheadian jargon, and hardly the most friendly introduction to Whitehead for the non-initiated, even if you’re unfamiliar with his basic terms you could still get a good feel for what they might mean and how they cohere into a fairly simple system. Just keep in mind the basic idea: that the universe, from the most microscopic level up, consists not of substances but of processes or events.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Ontology, epistemology, Whitehead | Leave a Comment »
Being TV-free (but wifi-capable) in the wilds of northeast Vermont, Facebook has become my main news source about the G20 protests in Toronto.
I’m taking the liberty of posting a snippet of (anonymous) conversation involving a friend who is there and a handful of interlocutors watching from a distance:
Posted in Politics | Tagged anarchy, Politics, Toronto | 5 Comments »
There’ve been smatterings of commentary on the posts dedicated to specific chapters of Vibrant Matter, but not the kind of extended arguments I had originally anticipated (before reading the book). So I’m guessing we may be wrapping up this cross-blog reading group (though Scu may still post on chapter 8).
To the list of entries, which can be found here, you can add my last two (on Signatures and Partitions of the sensible), and Scu‘s followed by my response to it. I don’t have much more to say beyond what I’ve already said. So instead what I’ll do here is to interleave several quotes from different posts (including Bennett’s own words from her interview with Peter Gratton) to create a kind of unresolved, non-chronological quasi-conversation among them. I apologize in advance for the selectiveness and for any inaccuracies in perception that may result from such a procedure. They’re merely intended to remind us of a few of the things that have been said. A brief summary comment follows.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Bennett, Ontology, epistemology | Leave a Comment »
Just as I was getting ready to wind up the Bennett discussions yesterday, Scu posted a substantial piece about chapter 7, and promised more to come on chapter 8. I’m glad to see it, since I thought there could have been more discussion about both (and about some general issues throughout the book).
Picking up on the same lines I had noted (“Since I have challenged the uniqueness of humanity in several ways, why not conclude that we and they are equally entitled? […] To put it bluntly, my conatus will not let me “horizontalize” the world completely”), Scu writes:
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Bennett, ethics, Ontology, epistemology, process philosophy | 1 Comment »
It’s difficult to say this, but I’ve decided to – [sob, sniff, sob] – sell my record collection. It took many years building it, though there was also a lot of sifting through and whittling down every time I moved (including two major cross-country moves in the past decade). From what remains (about 900 pieces), I’ve compiled a list of categories and approximate number of units in each; you can find that list here.
I know this goes against the current, just as records have made a solid comeback, at least among the hipsters in the know. But they take up a lot of space, I’ve duplicated most of the best of them in CDs and digital files, and, frankly, I could use the money for a new (used) car. (Horrors. Cars can’t take you where music does…)
I’m planning to post the list to eBay, in case someone wants to take the whole thing as a package off my hands. But I also have an interested buyer here in B-town — the excellent Burlington Records — and I’m not willing to watch it go in drips and drabs, or to do all the work that that involves. It will go as a collection, back into the flow of soundable vinyl that’s been circulating around the planet for some 120 years now. This little dam will break and will release a long, steady flow of very good music (with tears and memories mixed in), the product of many years of searching, finding, and delighting in vinyl and the magic that happens when the needle hits the groove…
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged music, records, vinyl | 3 Comments »
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