Incidentally I may have to shut down the automatic commenting capability on this blog for a little while to ward off the spamming machines that seem to have recently been attacking it.
I’m glad to see that Steven Shaviro and Levi Bryant have stepped into the fray of the debate over the relative virtues of object-centered versus relation-centered ontologies. (Among others, e.g. kvond, Peter Gratton, Graham Harman of course, and see the commenters to Levi’s posts on Harman and Whitehead). With some of the best blogging philosophers going at it, I’m content to sit on the sidelines and watch things unfold. To be fair, Shaviro and Harman, as well as Bryant, have been going at this kind of thing for a while now, but it’s nice to think that my review of Harman’s book helped to catalyze a little bit of the current flare-up. It’s fine to wait around for the print publication of Shaviro’s and Harman’s critiques of and responses to each other, but blogs are so much quicker at quenching one’s philosophic thirst. (And it’s nice to see Whitehead taking a more central place in this discussion.)
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Bryant, Harman, Ontology, epistemology, relationalism, Shaviro, speculative realism, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
The level of discussion following my review/critique of Harman’s Prince of Networks, along with Harman’s brief but welcome response, has encouraged me to post a few more thoughts about this difference between “relationalism” and “objectology” (my term for a central part of his object-oriented philosophy or ontology), that is, between a view that holds that the world is constituted by “relations all the way down”, and a view that admits the world is characterized by relations (of all sorts) but asserts that each entity has an essential non-relational essence. (Thanks to Mark Crosby for his eloquent summary of the dispute in the comments to the last post.) Harman’s reply raises a couple of issues I’d like to address at a little more length.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Deleuze, Harman, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
Continuing from yesterday’s post on Graham Harman… (Warning: This post is long.)
Where Tool-Being presented a Heidegger flushed clean of his anthropocentrism, Prince of Networks takes Bruno Latour for a ride on a philosophical adventure toward a world not of actors and networks but of objects, pure if not so simple. The book’s first half provides a detailed, clear, entertaining, and precise exegesis of Latour’s metaphysics through an examination of his claims in four books: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. The second, slightly longer half investigates some philosophical problems his actor-network theory opens up; explores lengthy detours through Meillassoux (on relationism and correlationism), Whitehead, Husserl (immanent objectivity), speculative realism, and other by-ways; and ends with a detailed explication of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, which, the argument goes, is made possible by Latour’s ‘flat ontology’ and deepened through Heidegger’s tool-being (with the aid of Zubiri and others), but which is ultimately Harman’s own. In effect, this is Harman building an all-star collective, enrolling Latour (who participates vicariously) and Heidegger (who’s too dead to tell us whether he’d go along with the project or not), with assistance from others, against the revolution by which Immanuel Kant installed humans at the philosophical center of everything.
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged Deleuze, Harman, Latour, mortality, object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 33 Comments »
A propos yesterday’s post on transition culture and the Bataillian (versus Malthusian) thermodynamics of ecopolitics, the new issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, on “(Sustainability) + Pleasure,” turns out to be all over this topic.
Wendy Steiner’s “The Joy of Less” introduces it well, positing a sensualism that’s quite happy with the “pleasure economy” of an “age of surplus” and that locates its heroes and prophets among such figures as Walt Whitman, William James (with his redefinition of meaning as “feelings of excited significance”), and the sensibility of European modernists (Baudelaire’s flaneur, Breton’s surrealist vagrant, and Nabokov’s Lolita-loving Humbert Humbert) — as opposed to the rhetoric of sustainability, which “is all about limits on freedom and the thwarting of desire.” “The disconnect between sustainability and pleasure is profound,” she writes, but then goes on to point out the blurrings and conciliations of the two both in children’s culture (school ecology programs, Wall-E) and in the postmodernist arts of Pynchon, Delillo, Chadwick and Spector, and others.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged Bataille, ecopolitics, hedonism, sustainability | 3 Comments »
Reading about the growing “transition towns” movement back to back with a read-through of Design Philosophy Papers’ latest issue on Bataille and “Inefficient Sustainability” has gotten me thinking about some of the unspoken premises that make their way into environmentalists’ prognostications of the future.
The transition towns movement began in Totnes, England, home of the Schumacher Society, and was spurred into motion in part from permaculturist Rob Hopkins’ work on transitioning to a sustainable economy, but it has now spread to hundreds of towns, villages, cities, and regions in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, and elsewhere. Drawing from permaculture founder David Holmgren’s modeling of energy transitions and associated crises, Eco-Mag’s Future Scenarios issue offers a particularly useful and concise synopsis of four possible futures, intended to be taken up in transition town salons and community forums and to help guide in the development of local transition plans and sustainability policies. The four scenarios are distinguished by differential rates of fossil-fuel energy decline (slow or fast) and of climate change symptoms (mild or severe) and by people’s responses to these changes. The general idea is that human use of oil and other fossil fuels is “peaking” and we need to transition toward more sustainable power sources, but that these aren’t readily available; they require more systematic social, political, technological, and economic changes than most are prepared to work toward; and any transition will be marked by the effects of climate changes already, to some extent, set in motion.
The four scenarios are “Brown Tech: Top Down Constriction”, where slow energy decline rates accompanied by severe climate change symptoms allow for aggressive “resource nationalism” and centralized government and corporate investment to prevail, but with wars and chaos looming in the background; “Green Tech: Distributed Powerdown,” where slow energy decline rates and mild climate change symptoms allow for greater diversity of responses at multiple scales, including strengthened “cultures of place”, distributed energy economies, and the like (this is perhaps a best-case scenario); “Earth Steward: Bottom Up Rebuild,” in which rapid energy declines but mild climate change symptoms bring about financial and economic shock, reduction of mobility, increases in crime, malnutrition, and disease, and a hollowing out of cities, but also the rise of a kind of quasi-feudal, neo-monastic ecodecentralism rising up in the ruins (akin to what Theodore Roszak described back in his 1970s Person/Planet); and “Lifeboats: Civilization Triage,” a kind of worst-case scenario where rapid energy decline accompanied by severe climate change leads to global breakdown, significant population decline, and the abandonment of cities, but with “oasis agriculture” and regional survivalism helped out by new opportunities — such as by the creation of “highly productive shallow waters and estuaries” in and around the “complex reef structures” made possible by urban architectures newly flooded in coastal lowlands around the world. (I love it.)
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy | Tagged Bataille, ecotheory, McDonough, Ontology, epistemology, recycling, Stoekl, transition towns | 3 Comments »
The obits have been coming in, albeit a little slowly, for Edward “Teddy” Goldsmith, founder of the fearless and influential British journal The Ecologist, co-founding member of Britain’s Green and Ecology parties, and publisher of the instrumental 1972 manifesto A Blueprint for Survival. Goldsmith, who died in his sleep on August 21, was a controversial figure, as well known in some circles for his conservative, some might say paleo-conservative, social views as for his ecological activism. Despite its faults and cringe moments, his 1992 book The Way: An Ecological Worldview synthesized a certain subset of environmental theories — ecological holism (Gaia, systems theory, etc.), anti-modernism, pro-indigenous and “vernacular culture” traditionalism (premised on a somewhat timeworn cultural ecology and an incipient ecopsychology), and anarcho-decentralism — as lucidly and ambitiously as anyone had done at the time (save perhaps Murray Bookchin). The fiery dust-up at The Ecologist over Goldsmith’s cavorting with figures in the European New Right in the mid-1990s left that magazine a little tattered (and a few editors short), though it’s recovered well since then. As a side effect of the split, former co-editors Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann, and others founded Corner House, which has been producing some of the most incisive left-green assessments of the state of the world since then. Hildyard et al’s earlier document Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons remains a socio-ecological classic.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged ecopolitics | Leave a Comment »
Just by linking Carl Sagan’s eloquent little Pale Blue Dot to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure’s Buddhist Blog brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan’s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I’ve discussed before here and here) is multivalent, but Sagan’s spin on it — the pale blue dot as “the aggregate of our joy and suffering” on which “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” — deepens its ability to carry useful meaning. That ability will one day exhaust itself, if not turn into its opposite, but for now I don’t think it has. “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [. . .] the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner [. . .] Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture | Tagged Buddhism, Deleuze, imagination, visuality, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
Over the past several days I’ve gone from the cool wetness of Alaska’s southeast coast to the high dryness of north-central New Mexico. The first was pure holiday, accompanied by loved ones (including those who generously funded it) and featuring glaciers, salmon, a black bear (devouring one of the salmon), a ride on one of the most scenic train routes in the world, and the ambiguous eco-ethics of spending a week on a cruise ship (but I decided not to look such a gift horse too closely in the mouth). The second has been a kind of work vacation involving a week of conversations on the topic of science, nature, and religion, generously funded, hosted (and wined and dined — there’s even a book about their culinary tradition) by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
The SAR has been funding anthropological research, hosting seminars and residencies, publishing books, and working alongside Native American artists to collect and preserve art and material culture for over a hundred years now. Its campus, a former artist’s colony called El Delirio and cheekily referred to as an “anthropologists’ resort,” is just outside downtown Santa Fe, which, at 7000 feet, is a deceptively uncitylike state capital; buildings are restricted to three stories and a limited range of variations on deep-cream-colored adobe (or adobe-style) architecture. The late summer days here heat up, albeit sweatlessly, but the mornings, evenings, and nights swell up invitingly into the big starry sky, with sweet summer smells of lush semi-desert vegetation (pinyon pine and juniper, cottonwood, fruit trees, yucca, Russian olive blossoms, cholla cactus), layers of soft cricket chirpings, and the occasional coyote chorus or quite (but communicative) prairie dog (see above) scurrying around in the grasses. The city is greener than I remember it from a brief visit in 1994, and it seems to be dealing with its water issues reasonably well (water being the limiting factor in these parts). It feels good to be in the southwest again (having visited this part of the country only briefly a few times since my fieldwork in Arizona in the mid-1990s).
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter | Tagged anthropology, Christianity, cosmopolitics, ecopolitics, ecotheology, Latour, paganism, Stengers, syncretism | 3 Comments »
I recently worked my way through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which, since its publication in 2007, has become one of the most widely reviewed and critically lauded books on religion and secularism — and which, in a tangential way, was one of the provocations that led me to start this blog in the first place. What follows are some thoughts on Taylor’s notions of immanence and transcendence, and on the “third way” of radical immanence, or immanent naturalism, that has become an important conversation partner in the debate that has arisen in the wake of Taylor’s book. (See The Immanent Frame for some of this debate, especially the contributions by William Connolly, Elizabeth Hurd, Lars Tonder, Patrick Lee Miller, and Taylor himself.) These thoughts are taken from a longer argument that I presented at last week’s ISSRNC conference in Amsterdam.
It’s rare that a nearly 900-page tome of dense and circuitous philosophical and historical prose gets the kind of attention A Secular Age has gotten, and the fact that Taylor is as brilliant, respectful, and nuanced a thinker as he is makes it a book well worth celebrating. Conferences have been held in its honor, and the Social Science Research Institute-supported blog The Immanent Frame, on “secularism, religion, and the public sphere” and named after one of the book’s central concepts, has attracted the contributions of dozens of high-profile thinkers to weigh in on the themes raised by Taylor. (The list includes Talal Asad, Arjun Appadurai, Robert Bellah, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Martin Marty, Wendy Brown, Craig Calhoun, Jose Casanova, William Connolly, Saba Mahmoud, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Roger Gottlieb, Timothy Fitzgerald, Todd Gitlin, Christina Lafont, and Taylor himself.)
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged Connolly, immanent naturalism, religion, Taylor | 12 Comments »
Today, my last day in Amsterdam, I finally made it to the monument unveiled last year honoring Baruch de Spinoza. Since the talk I gave at the ISSRNC conference here was on immanence (specifically, Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘immanent frame’ and William Connolly’s and others’ immanent naturalism), there was no way around visiting the eminent philosopher of immanence himself.
The bronze monument stands in front of the city hall and at the entrance to the old Jewish Quarter in which Spinoza grew up (he was born in Amsterdam to a family of Sephardic Jewish refugees from Spain). Spinoza’s back is to one the tree-lined canals floating to the Amstel, and a few feet away from him is an icosahedron, a 20-faced geometric form that refers to the geometrical method that informed his philosophy. The coat he is wearing features several birds — rose-ringed parakeets and sparrows, the former being bright green birds that are exotic to Amsterdam and that first settled in the nearby Vondelpark, the latter a diminishing native breed — and roses, which apparently symbolize Spinoza, whose name means “thorn” in Portuguese, but which to my mind also represent the love that infused his philosophical writings. A thorn in the side of authoritarians (the text on the base of the statue is a rather optimistic quote from Spinoza, “The purpose of the State is freedom”), Spinoza preached democracy, tolerance, freedom of thought and expression, a monism which he opposed to Cartesian mind-body dualism, and an immanent naturalism that equated nature with God, for which he was excommunicated from his synagogue and his books banned by the Catholic church. The Spinoza Monument Publication quotes his words in its dedication of the statue: “Gratitude or thankfulness is love’s desire or endeavor to do good to someone who has done us a service out of an equal love affect.”
Earlier this year, local artists along with the Amsterdam Spinoza Circle put on a series of events in his honor, including performances, installations, discussions, a series of posters exhibited around the city, and more, under the title My Name is Spinoza. I can’t think of a more appropriate place to do that than friendly, liberal, multicultural Amsterdam, which no matter how thoroughly humanized its nature may be, is a place that, with its famous tolerance for the virtues and vices of human nature, well reflects Spinoza’s sentiment that you can’t hate nature. That said, incidents of intolerance have marred the city’s and country’s reputation recently, but they seem, from my brief visit and the reading I’ve done while here, like exceptions to a general rule of getting along, parakeets and sparrows and all, infused by a love of knowledge and of life.
Spinoza has been rediscovered repeatedly, more recently by post-Marxist political theorists like Althusser, Deleuze, and Negri in the 1960s and 1870s, but also, as I’ve discussed here, by deep ecology founder Arne Naess and, a little later, by anti-Cartesian neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. While the world has caught up with him, to some degree, in its political liberalism, his non-Cartesianism represents, to many, the philosophical path not taken — until now, perhaps, as mind-body dualism winds its way down and is replaced by a more subtle understanding of how thinking, feeling, and bodily affects interact to produce the relations that constitute us.
More information about the monument can be found here. More detailed photographs can be seen here and here. And for eloquent Spinozist blogging, I recommend kvond’s Frames /sing.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter | Tagged dualism, immanence, Spinoza | 2 Comments »
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