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Levi Bryant has an interesting post on how the internet is changing the way philosophy gets done. For Levi the web, despite its drawbacks, represents

“something of a dialectical synthesis between the Athenian agora and text. Any idiot gets to speak and participate in discussion, and audience is no longer an audience of fellow scholars within a discipline, but whoever comes along and has something interesting and intelligent (hopefully) to say. As a consequence, the sorts of dialogues that emerge in print are no longer determined by the gate-keepers of elite journals, conferences, or the pedigree of schools, but rather are the consequence of the formation of collectives that are borne of people that would like to talk a bit more with each other. Not only do we witness the emergence of electronic journals and presses devoted to rendering intellectual labor a dimension of “the common”, of that which is owned by no one, of that which is readily available to everyone who is able to click on a link, but all sorts of new possibilities emerge within this common as well. […] It is now possible for graduate students to engage with established thinkers one on one whether through email or through blogs.”

And over time, I’m sure (it’s happening already), those among the established thinkers who engage with these electronic-pioneering graduate students — blogging philosophers and cultural theorists like Bryant himself, Harman, Leiter, Shaviro, Jodi Dean, Henry Jenkins, et al — will grow in influence, while those who don’t will gradually fade away.

I don’t think the open-access internet will ever become the sole venue, and probably not even the primary venue, for philosophical and critical thought. Specialized journals and elite societies with their gatekeepers and credentials-checkers will continue to play an important role, because they perform a useful function and because the academic profession requires that sort of thing. But the two will grow into a kind of symbiosis with each other. So tomorrow’s Socrates and Zeno will be debating in the electronic agora as much as they will be lecturing in the academy, and Epicurus and Plotinus will be blogging the daily regimen from their philosophical communes. Traffic will flow smoothly and steadily between the streets, the teahouses and libraries, and the deserts and monasteries to which the empire’s refugees have retreated. (Or ecosteries, rather, where the practicalities of sustainable living will be figured out as society redesigns itself for a post-carbon future. A sweet thought in a time when the gushing blackness of oil seems bottomless.)

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With all that in mind, it’s good to see Progressive Geographies, Archive Fire, Critical Animal, and others chipping in to the Vibrant Matter blogathon (which is becoming ever more spread out, including on this week’s host blog, Philosophy in a Time of Error).

And good, also, to see the continuing activity everywhere on the Middlesex crisis — which reminds us that without the academy the digital agora, at least its philosophical wing, risks losing its muscle, if not its raison d’être. Philosophy still needs the intensity of face-to-face discussion, debate, close mentoring, and the institutional grooming that goes along with it.

Still, it’s nice to dream of a world in which philosophy and the liberal arts aren’t seen as unprofitable appendages left over from an era of bloated welfare states (a neoliberal narrative that is deeply problematic), but where they are vital nodes within a culture of social and ecological transformation — not because philosophy feeds social change in some direct, instrumental way, but because of a shared recognition between philosophers and activists of how and why it is that we have come to live in a world of oil spills and economic crises, and how and why it could be all different.

The Vibrant Matter Reading Group has launched: see Peter Gratton’s generous flow of postings at Philosophy in a Time of Error, all linked here.

What follows is my first series of thoughts on the book, with a focus on chapter 1. I’ll try to add bits of these as appropriate to the comments in Peter’s postings, but since I’ll be in transit for a large part of today and at a retreat much of the day tomorrow, I thought I would get these out here first.

To start with, I should say that I am deeply sympathetic to Bennett’s project, which I see as closely aligned with the theoretical task that’s been central to my own thinking for several years now. That task is the articulation of a post-constructivist understanding of the world, one that sees the world to be made up of complex relational processes that, at one and the same time, take material forms (things we can see, measure, predict, and so on) and contain or express affective-semiotic dynamics (“internal” dynamics associated with perception, responsiveness, subjectivity, and affectivity or feeling). Such a “process-relational” view attempts to overcome the divides between object and subject, matter and mind/spirit, realism and constructivism, structure and agency — divides that have shaped and encumbered western thinking for centuries — by resituating them within dynamic processes of world-making and becoming.

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I’ve been wanting to post something about the images of the Gulf oil spill (or, rather, of the unmitigated man made deep water volcanic vent of crude oil and gas) — about what they indicate (i.e. directly inform us about), what they symbolize (i.e., mean) and iconize (look like), and why it might be that CNN and other cable news outlets are so fascinated by the Spillcam. Of course, they mean different things to different people: corporate negligence or ecocide to some, more disappointment in political saviors to others, the dark ecological eye of the Real to yet others (at least that’s something like what I would expect to hear from Zizekians, Mortonites, and maybe dark vitalists), and perhaps just a vague of sense of weird (un)reality to most.

We leap from rock to rock across a raging river — economic crash, volcanic fog, oil spill, and so on — and these are the images that link the chain for us, the dream of globality, the chain we can use as a string of prayer beads or as the rope to strangle ourselves with.

… And about the Middlesex philosophy fiasco, which one can hope isn’t a harbinger of academic seismic shifts to come. (We have some power not to let that happen.)

I’ve been too busy writing and dealing with other matters to do much of either. But it’s a good time for thinking about the sorts of things Jane Bennett writes about in her political ecology of things. The reading group should be getting started over at Philosophy in a Time of Error shortly (and winding its way over here eventually).

A couple of recent posts by Chris Vitale and Tim Morton have rekindled my thinking about Deleuze’s crystal-image. Chris’s interesting post is about the power of crowdsourcing and video detournement in delivering a more democratic form of media politics. Tim’s brief posts share music videos and reflections on dark ecology and the timbral.

Chris describes the video detournements as “crystal-images,” where “one image acts as a germ or seed, and it crystalizes the medium its in, just like a string when you make rock candy. The result is a proliferation of possible paths the image can take, but they all echo each other.” My understanding of the crystal-image is a little different from this, but I think it’s fruitful to pursue Chris’s trajectory while combining it with the more ambient trajectory of Tim’s and Deleuze’s own thought. The crystal-image is fundamentally about time, which, for Deleuze (following Bergson), is the flow in which we find ourselves, looking back and forward at one and the same moment. Deleuze writes:

“What the crystal reveals or makes visible is the hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved.” (Cinema 2, p. 98)

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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.

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.

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.

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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!

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.)

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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. [. . .]

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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.

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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.

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