The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers (yes, that’s a council I hope to hear more from) will be holding water ceremonies around the world all day tomorrow. From the Black Hills of South Dakota to Oaxaca and Brazil to Africa, Nepal, and Aotearoa. Sounds like an event worth attending.
Now if we just stop spilling oil in some of the waters we depend on most.
Posted in Eco-culture | 2 Comments »
The mirror neuron meme continues to circulate via that dependable circulator of likable sciencey ideas, Jeremy Rifkin:
There’s much more to his argument than mirror neurons (fortunately).
“Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of death and the celebration of life in rooting for each other to flourish and be. It’s based on our frailties and our imperfections.”
“Empathy is the invisible hand. Empathy is what allows us to stretch our sensibility with another so that we can cohere in larger social units. To empathize is to civilize; to civilize is to empathize.”
If the invisible hand of the liberal right is the market, and of the conservative right is tradition, is the invisible hand of the left empathic sociality? And is science now on its side?
See The Empathic Civilization for more. And the RSA for more videos by the likes of David Harvey, Matthieu Ricard, Barbara Ehrenreich, Slavoj Zizek, Tzvetan Todorov, and others.
Hat tip to Symbiotika.
Posted in Spirit matter | 1 Comment »
The New York Times launches a philosophy blog and asks Simon Critchley to moderate it. Brian Leiter goes apoplectic.
For some background on the Leiter-Critchley conflict, which turns out to be as much about the analytic-Continental divide as it is about Leiter and Critchley, see Leiter’s account of their brawl over Derrida’s legacy (which Leiter takes to be shameful), John Hartmann’s critique of Leiter’s philosophy department rankings (which aren’t just Leiter’s, but which do tend to marginalize continentals), and this discussion at An und für sich.
Leiter does write about Nietzsche, was right about Carlin Romano’s hatchet job on Heidegger at the Chronicle for Higher Ed, and he’s not usually as petty as this, so the conflict is also clearly personal. I’m getting out of the way.
Posted in Academe | Leave a Comment »
The previously announced ‘Vibrant Matter’ reading group will take place across five blogs over five weeks, beginning May 23 and ending June 26. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is the latest book by Johns Hopkins University political theorist Jane Bennett. Philosophy in a Time of Error has posted a very useful overview of the book, along with an interview with its author. Anyone interested in participating is invited to read these, and to order your copy of the book in time for the first session. (I’ve asked Duke University Press about a possible discount for participants, but not heard back from them. Here in the States, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Overstock.com offer the best deals at the moment.)
The reading schedule will be as follows:
May 23-29
Host blog: Philosophy in a Time of Error (Peter Gratton)
Under discussion: Preface & Chapter 1, “The Force of Things” (and overview/interview).
May 30-June 5
Host blog: Critical Animal (James Stanescu)
Under discussion: Chapters 2 and 3, “The Agency of Assemblages” and “Edible Matter.”
June 6-12
Host blog: Naught Thought (Ben Woodard)
Under discussion: Chapters 4 and 5, “A Life of Matter” and “Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism.”
June 13-19
Host blog: An und für sich (Anthony Paul Smith)
Under discussion: Chapters 6 and 7, “Stem Cells and the Culture of Life” and “Political Ecologies”
June 20-26
Host blog: Immanence (Adrian Ivakhiv)
Under discussion: Chapter 8, “Vitality and Self-interest,” and the book as a whole (final overview).
All welcome!
Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Jane Bennett, speculative realism | 5 Comments »
The case has often been made — by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others — that Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist), relational, evolutionary, and non-dualistic in its overcoming of the subject-object and mind-matter dichotomies. For what it’s worth (this part probably isn’t necessary to an ecological worldview, though it may be attractive to some of its proponents), Whitehead’s philosophy is also more or less panexperientialist or panpsychist, which means that it acknowledges mind or mental activity, defined at least in a very minimal sense, throughout the universe; and, if one cares about its theological stance (which many classical Whiteheadians do), it is more or less panentheistic, recognizing divinity as both immanent in the world (i.e., pantheistic) and transcendent of it (in that the divine acts to lure creation/creativity/evolution forward to greater novelty, complexity, and beauty).
While the relations between Whitehead, on one hand, and Deleuze, Bergson, and others I’ve written about here (including even Madhyamika Buddhism) on the other, have all been explored in various places, it’s surprising to me how few comparative studies there are of the metaphysics of Whitehead and of Charles Sanders Peirce. On the face of it, the two shared more than the other pairings. For one thing, Peirce’s Collected Papers were housed, edited, and first published at Harvard where Whitehead was a professor at the time, and Whitehead’s student Charles Hartshorne was one of the first editors and commentators on Peirce’s oeuvre. In sensibility, there is much overlap and resonance between the two: both were strongly empirically grounded philosophers, logicians and mathematicians no less, whose interest in metaphysics was first and foremost an interest in accounting for reality as we know, perceive, and live it. Both took sharp aim at Cartesian dualism, so both anticipate the critique of anthropocentrism that characterizes a lot of contemporary environmental thought. And both are, broadly speaking, philosophers of process, becoming, and evolutionary change. (On this shared processualist background, see Nicholas Rescher’s Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues, Browning and Myers’ Philosophers of Process, and David Ray Griffin’s Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne.)
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Peirce, Whitehead | 9 Comments »
I’m on the road, and haven’t been able to keep up with the continuing exchange that’s now drawn in Steven Shaviro and Chris Vitale in addition to Levi and Graham, with side comments from Peter Gratton and others. That despite Graham’s call for a “cease fire,” which elicited some spirited responses from Levi, Steven, and Chris.
For me, some of Levi’s most beautiful writing comes when he gets personal. The first few paragraphs in his reply to the cease fire call are among the peak of the whole discussion, because they get at why he and probably all of us, to some extent, engage in this form of public debate:
“Where Harman is of the sentiment that arguments should take place in written text, I find that I only come to know what I think in my interaction with others. In certain ways this has been the plague of my academic career. Where the ordinary order of things is to treat the published text as what as important and the exchange as derivative, I often experience an acute suffering when it comes to the written text. The written text, to me, feels like excrement, like a remainder, like a waste or a frozen petrification of a living object: Dialogue. [. . .]
“I conceive the written text as a missive, a letter, rather than a statue. And since dialogues or discussions are distinct objects, it follows that I am not the author of these posts and texts. And this for the very simple reason that in a dialogue one can never know what comes from where. If there is an author named “Levi”, then the name Levi can only name a space of entanglements, of discussions, of dialogues where it is impossible to determine what idea or concept might have originated from me and what ideas, concepts or arguments might have originated with my various interlocutors. [. . .]
Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy | Tagged blogosphere, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism | 2 Comments »
How refreshing to be finally moving into the era of green-green conflicts — ecological controversies in which both sides claim to be defending what we used to call “nature” (or “the ecology”) and both actually make a good case for it. The Cape Wind energy project presages the kind of ecological conflict we will hopefully see much more of in the future.
By “hopefully” I mean to suggest that if things go better rather than worse, we will one day be telling stories about how it was in the pre-ecological era, when the typical environmental conflict pitted ‘greens’ against dinosaur industrialists, property-rights libertarians, economic-growth statists, and retrograde rednecks. The difference with Cape Wind is that, as this Boston Phoenix story makes clear, there are not only Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue, but environmentalists, labor groups, and civic activists are also split along not-very-traditional lines. (For instance, Greenpeace, the National Resource Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Massachusetts Audubon Society are all for it; the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the Animal Welfare Institute, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Industrial Wind Action Group, among others, are against it).
This is the point, then, where the “environmentalist” designation starts to break down (or self-differentiate, to put a Deleuzian spin on it), and where the slogan “we are all environmentalists now” — attributed, ironically, to George Bush the Elder — begins to take on a truthfulness it has never really had.
What accounts for the strange mix of alliances on both sides? At first blush, politicians seem to fall almost randomly this way or that (the late Ted Kennedy and his Republican successor Scott Brown against it, Massachusetts Democratic governor Deval Patrick for it). But I think there’s some pattern to the chaos, with eco-pragmatists, including the “realos” in the Obama administration, such as Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, being for it because it will help the U.S. start catching up with Europe’s and China’s progress on wind power (emphasis on the “start”). Pragmatism on a national scale, however, can butt heads with pragmatism on a local scale, especially in a place like Nantucket Sound, where tourism is a leading industry.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | 1 Comment »
I’m sorry to have to miss this weekend’s philosophers’ rematch. But if the Monty Python crew is the British answer to French existentialism, as Julian Baggini claims in The Guardian, how about having the Brits (Bentham, Russell, Hume, Adam Smith, et al) take on the French (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, de Beauvoir – a female first for philosophers’ football?)… Goals scored notwithstanding, the French would certainly outstyle their off-continent rivals.
Posted in Academe | Leave a Comment »
Greg Garrard, who’s become something of a point-man for synoptic treatments of ecocriticism (like this one, and see my previous post on him), has come out with a lucid and judicious review of recent publications in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. It covers the years 2007-8, which Garrard, in an email to the ASLE listserv, calls “an exceptionally good couple of years for ecocriticism.” An uncorrected draft version of the review can be read on Greg’s academia.edu page.
It’s a commendable effort to make some sense out of the various approaches one finds in the field. Parsing things into categories is always tricky, and Garrard’s first paradigm, “Normal Science,” is probably the cleanest cut: referring to the “backpacker school of criticism,” this section highlights work by Scott Slovic (Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility) and David Whitley (The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation). This is “established practice,” the dominant paradigm as it were, and the fact that so few pages are expended on it while so many describe four “rivals” tells us exactly how paradigmatically unsettled the field is.
The second classification, “Re-Enchantment,” highlighted here through work by the late Val Plumwood, Patrick Curry, and Anthony Lioi, among others, covers a good swath of fairly traditional (by now) ecocritical writing as well, arguably taking us back to the proto-ecocriticisms of Theodore Roszak, Neil Evernden, and their Romantic forebears. Only with the third section does a sharply announced new paradigm threaten to appear on the horizon. “Against Nature” covers Tim Morton, Dana Phillips, queer ecology, animal studies, posthumanism, and more. That may be too much for a single term to carry, however, especially if the signifier “nature” is seen to be more or less interchangeable with a series of others (ecology, environment, land, etc.), as it tends to be in common usage. In amidst some praise, Garrard reserves some of his strongest barbs for Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, of which he writes,
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged ecocriticism | 4 Comments »
I should probably resist from critiquing blog posts, since these rarely capture one’s considered thoughts the way print articles and books do. So rather than replying in detail to Graham’s rejoinder to my previous post, I’ll agree to the cease-fire he proposes (though I hope we weren’t really sniping at each other!). At least after making one last point, which I’ll do by creatively misquoting his penultimate paragraph, specifically by inverting the object-relation duality:
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism | 5 Comments »
I’m looking forward to Graham Harman’s forthcoming review of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and I’m glad to see that this discussion between object-oriented philosophy and Bennett’s vibrant materialism (and, by extension, the other theoretical impulses she draws on, which this blog, for the most part, enthusiastically shares) is getting underway. That discussion will no doubt continue over the summer as this blog, Critical Animal, Philosophy in a Time of Error, and maybe a few others engage in a collective reading of Bennett’s book. (Perhaps that should be followed by a group reading of Tim Morton’s new book, The Ecological Thought.)
While Graham’s argument that relationism is “a spent force” is obviously not one that will convince the growing number of scholars drawing in productive ways on relational theories (Whitehead’s, Deleuze’s, Bergson’s, Simondon’s, Latour’s, Serres’s, Stengers’s, et al), he’s entitled to make that case. He summarizes his objection here in this way:
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Harman, object-oriented philosophy, Peirce, relationalism, Whitehead | 7 Comments »
Happy May Day and merry Beltane, to those in a mood to celebrate this weekend. I’m traveling and unable to blog much, but the past week’s events warrant at least a quick update on why such a mood might be difficult to sustain with any steadiness.
The biggest environmental bad news story was, of course, the Gulf oil spill, which threatens to turn Louisiana’s wetlands and much of the Gulf of Mexico into an industrial sacrifice zone and, according to some voices, to become one of the worst ecological disasters in history. (More pictures, as well as maps, here.) Jonathan Hiskes at Grist, which, as always, is doing an admirable job keeping up with events, calls this the The worst week ever, brought to you by the fossil-fuel industry. Hiskes notes the deaths of two coal miners in Kentucky, the talk of sinking the Chinese coal freighter that crashed recently into the Great Barrier Reef, and the approval of the Cape Wind energy project off Martha’s Vineyard — which, as the week’s leading good news story still “feels pretty bad” for all the sparring that went on around it. All the while, the fossil fuel industry continues to make huge profits.
The best news might have been the dissemination of the final conclusions from the Cochabamba conference’s working groups. Despite their marginality in the echelons of global power, these conclusions are at least making a clear case for a global eco-socialist alternative, a case that will be heard by some thanks to the Bolivian government’s pursuit of them in the United Nations. President Morales submitted the conference’s Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth for consideration to the UN this week.
Elsewhere: PBS’s two best programs, Bill Moyers’ Journal and Now (which Moyers started) signed off for the last time yesterday. Pierre Hadot signed off as well, for good. And Middlesex University announced it will close its top-rated Philosophy program (reports of this and of philosophers protesting the economically driven decision are all over the philosoblogosphere, but Infinite Thought is as good a place to catch up on it as any).
In somewhat less sobering news, Dot Earth alerts us to the Lens‘s Moment in Time project, a global moment for catching a collective glimpse of humanity in action, to take place at 11 am New york time tomorrow (Sunday). E. O. Wilson has been doing what he does best, which is writing about ants — which Larval Subjects’ recent note on made me think of how an ant megalopolis is a perfect example of how difficult to isolate “objects” from the relational world. (What’s an object here? A single ant? Nope. The entire city? Yes, but it’s co-evolved with its surroundings to such a degree one could hardly place boundaries around it…) Stuart Elden, meanwhile, joined the blogosphere. Welcome, Stu.
And extraterrestrials circling around Alpha Centauri finally got to watch the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake Super Bowl event. Many debates followed.
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology | 1 Comment »
