Judith Butler’s recent talk on Alfred North Whitehead, which you can listen to here, is very impressive — and a heartening sign of the times. With Butler distancing herself from some of the implications of her earlier work on sex and gender (30-some minutes into the talk) and decisively settling into post-constructivist, non-anthropocentric, process-relational*, immanent […]
Posts Tagged ‘Whitehead’
more serious (nutritious) morsels…
Posted in Blog stuff, tagged blogosphere, post-constructivism, Whitehead on February 25, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Bryant’s objects & a possible object/subjectology
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Bryant, Harman, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead on January 31, 2010 | 9 Comments »
Reading Levi Bryant’s blog sometimes feels like having a brilliant storm of white-hot thought rain down upon one’s backyard garden, the shoots struggling to stay vertical, but rendered that much stronger after the rain. There are wonderful passages in his recent musings on ethics, relations, objects, and ontology. From Ethical Etymologies: Thinking Out Loud (Always […]
the politics of objects & relations
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged Bergson, Bryant, Buddhism, Deleuze, Harman, object-oriented philosophy, political theory, relationalism, speculative realism, Spinoza, Whitehead on January 29, 2010 | 5 Comments »
The objects versus relations debate has revved up again over at Larval Subjects, in the commentary responding to Levi Bryant’s Questions about the possibility of non-correlationist ethics. The debate, as I would describe it, circles around the following question: If we agree that traditional philosophy has been too centrally premised on the relationship between humans […]
subjectivity, impermanence, & dark flow
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, flow, Lacan, meditation, mindfulness, Ontology, epistemology, Shinzen Young, Vipassana, Whitehead on December 7, 2009 | 19 Comments »
I think the idea and image of dark flow streaming out of our universe has also been resonating with me because of the work I’ve been doing using Vipassana teacher Shinzen Young’s system of mindfulness training. [. . .] Dark Flow is the (cosmic) Real, the shimmering atomic structure of things behind the structured object-world we (think we) see, the wave-like spirit-energy that Buddhists calls “emptiness” only because giving it a more substantialist term would already be a way of trying to contain it. Call it emptiness, or dark flow. If astrophysicists hadn’t “seen” it, we would have had to invent it. (I mean we, invent, it.)
still processing
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Deleuze, Harman, speculative realism, Whitehead on September 29, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Harman responds to my last post at generous length here. I realize I should have thought this through better before I sent it off, since I don’t really have time to work on a response or an involved dialogue with him at the moment. (And neither does he, as he has said a few times, […]
still process-relations all the way down
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Delanda, Deleuze, Harman, Latour, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead on September 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Keeping up with Graham Harman means continually being tempted to respond to him, and since he doesn’t allow comments on his blog, for reasons I completely understand, I can only hold my tongue or flap it here. (Or I can do the respectful thing and write up a lengthier and more in-depth argument, but that […]
relations vs. objects, part x
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Bryant, Harman, Ontology, epistemology, relationalism, Shaviro, speculative realism, Whitehead on September 18, 2009 | 1 Comment »
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 […]
More on Harman, or what’s outside the system of relations?
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Deleuze, Harman, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead on September 11, 2009 | 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 […]
Things slip away… (on Harman’s Latourian object lessons)
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged Deleuze, Harman, Latour, mortality, object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead on September 9, 2009 | 33 Comments »
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 […]
spinning the Earth
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged Buddhism, Deleuze, imagination, visuality, Whitehead on August 25, 2009 | 5 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M&hl=en&fs=1& 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 […]
when bad things happen (karma running over dogma)
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Bennett, Buddhism, deconstruction, Deleuze, mortality, Whitehead on June 26, 2009 | 4 Comments »
We live in a universe of hazard, a place where asteroids strike, where car smash-ups pluck out a life like a boot squashing a centipede, where planes fall out of the sky, a heart attack takes a brother from behind in the middle of a night, a train runs over a friend’s passed out daughter, […]
open-source socialism & the politics of self-organizing systems
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Politics, Process-relational thought, tagged autopoiesis, biology, ecology, ecotheory, enactive cognition, political ecology, self-organization, Whitehead on May 27, 2009 | 4 Comments »
(On Kevin Kelly’s “The New Socialism,” Paul Ward’s Medea Hypothesis, Steven Shaviro’s “Against Self-Organization,” and more.) Self-organizing adaptive systems and other networks are more than just the flavor of the philosophical month; they are a model increasingly used to make sense of the natural and cultural worlds. Generally it’s assumed that such distributed self-organization is […]