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Posts Tagged ‘Whitehead’

realism, or bust

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on September 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Michael at Archive Fire just shared a good quote from Latour on Whitehead, “king of the realists.” Funny thing — I just finished up some comments introducing Whitehead to my ecocinema students… The upshot of those comments is that, according to Whitehead’s attempt to rewire the metaphysics of the western world, there are no things, […]

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in defense of relations (again)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on August 21, 2010 | 19 Comments »

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.”

[…]

My belief, if it needs reiterating, is that we -– society at large -– still have not developed a nuanced enough understanding of the nature of relational process, including the many different kinds of relational processes that make up the world. This is why we still put animals in cages (as if the jaguar in a cage is the same as the jaguar in a forest) and dump toxins on our farms (as if the final product is the pest-free corn and not the health of the soil), still produce objects that are guaranteed to be obsolete junk in a few years (as if their making and disposal wasn’t an integral part of them), still buy those objects (as if they will satisfy our cravings for something new and exciting), still send soldiers to war and forget about them when they come back (leaving their partners and kids without health insurance, as is the case with a friend of ours who lives up the road), still expect that we can “win” wars (as if they won’t breed the resentment that will lead to even worse wars), still define people according to fixed gender identities and racial categories, and put people away for life (in this country at least) because they don’t have the means to live in ways that would exercise their creative potential, and so on and so forth. […]

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almost a real Paris

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , on August 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »

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 […]

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SR, Whitehead, etc.

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on June 29, 2010 | 4 Comments »

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 […]

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actual occasions

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on June 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

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 […]

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daughter objects (& processes)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on June 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Levi has a nice post on pedagogy, objects, and his daughter. His conclusions, I think, can be rephrased in terms more amenable to an objects-relations dialogue. [. . .] Since Graham has set out a challenge (“Take that, relationists!”), I’ll take a very quick stab at a process-relational reply:

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Peirce-Whitehead-Hartshorne & process-relational ontology

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , on June 9, 2010 | 6 Comments »

The following are some working notes following up on my previous post on the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, specifically on Peirce’s logical/relational/phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and Whitehead’s notion of prehension and the “actual occasion.” It’s become clear to me since writing that post that any rapprochement between the two requires going through Charles Hartshorne (which is something I had been resisting due to the theological cast of many of Hartshorne’s writings, but I’ve come to see that it’s unavoidable). [. . .]

This asymmetry is what gives process-relational ontology, at least the kind exemplified by these three thinkers, its evolutionary character and forward momentum. It is also what makes it different from relational philosophies for which all things are symmetrically related to all other things, resulting in the kind of formless, changeless “ontological stew” that Graham Harman (and sometimes Levi Bryant) has critiqued (to which I’ve responded in posts like these).

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between Whitehead & Peirce

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on May 12, 2010 | 9 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 […]

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ontologizing

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on May 4, 2010 | 7 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 […]

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subjects & objects, together or apart…

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on April 9, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Levi Bryant’s detailed and generous replies to my critical queries, both in the comments section of this post and at Larval Subjects, and Graham Harman’s replies here (and in an e-mail exchange) have helped me get a much clearer sense of where the main differences lie between their respective “object-oriented” positions and my relational view. […]

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space junk & the (relational) Real

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2010 | 5 Comments »

(This post spun off from the last, where I concluded by noting the increasing amount of debris out in the upper atmosphere. Somehow I couldn’t resist pulling that image into the vortex of ecopolitics and the objects-relations debate, which is carrying on at hyper tiling, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Larval Subjects, and elsewhere.) Like the tail of […]

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cinema, ontology, ecology

Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on March 14, 2010 | 8 Comments »

I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed. Here’s one articulation of that model. [. . .]

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