{"id":1188,"date":"2010-01-30T15:18:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-30T20:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/30\/visualizing-immanence\/"},"modified":"2010-12-26T16:58:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-26T21:58:34","slug":"visualizing-immanence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/30\/visualizing-immanence\/","title":{"rendered":"visualizing immanence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QnTH4VSIQZw?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, <a href=\"http:\/\/documentaryheaven.com\/the-secret-life-of-chaos\/\">The Secret Life of Chaos<\/a>, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos\/complexity theory, etc.), the &#8220;butterfly effect,&#8221; fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward Lorenz, Benoit Mandelbrot, and others &#8212; it&#8217;s all there. Iraqi-born physicist-host Jim Al-Khalili gives us the enthusiasm and hipness of a newfangled (and perhaps more respectable) <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Connections_%28TV_series%29\">James Burke<\/a>, and the music, from Arvo Part&#8217;s opening strains (&#8220;Spiegel im Spiegel&#8221;) to Satie, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, et al, adds a great deal to the pleasure of watching it. Nice work on BBC&#8217;s part.<\/p>\n<p>The doc provides helpful tools for visualizing dynamic systems, which are part of what&#8217;s making it possible for science and culture, Latour&#8217;s two poles of the &#8220;modern constitution,&#8221; to work their way toward a rapprochement. What&#8217;s still missing is the integration of first-person subjectivity &#8212; mind as opposed to body &#8212; which biosemiotics (drawing on Peirce, von Uexkull, Bateson, Sebeok, et al), Whiteheadian process metaphysics, enactive cognitivism, and related schools of thought, help to get at. To actually bring these together into a successful and convincing synthesis &#8212; one that would put Newton, Descartes, and the rest fully into the past and put cognitive science on a much stronger footing (in my opinion) &#8212; will require a lot more work, of course. Philosophers in particular have their work cut out for them (as my recent <a href=\"http:\/\/larvalsubjects.wordpress.com\/2010\/01\/30\/meriologies-and-objects\/\">exchange with Levi Bryant<\/a> might suggest).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b00pv1c3\">The Secret Life of Chaos<\/a> is in six 10-minutes segments, but if you only have a few minutes to sample it now, watch the bit on feedback loops and the butterfly effect that begins this segement:<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UxAltBlGZAo?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, John Law&#8217;s post-Actor-Network-Theory <em>After Method: Mess in Social Science Research<\/em>, which I&#8217;ve mentioned positively a few times here recently, has now been made available at the fabulous ever expanding scholar-hipster&#8217;s online library <a href=\"http:\/\/a.aaaarg.org\/text\/9063\/after-method-mess-social-science-research\">aaaarg.org<\/a>. A few  of the missing social-science pieces I mentioned work their way into Law&#8217;s book&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/integral-options.blogspot.com\/2010\/01\/bbc-secret-life-of-chaos.html\">Integral Options Cafe<\/a> for blogging about the BBC doc, which just premiered in the UK this past week.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos\/complexity theory, etc.), the &#8220;butterfly effect,&#8221; fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward Lorenz, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,691847,689354],"tags":[4442,4435,16815,201],"class_list":["post-1188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-religion-spirituality","category-image_nation","tag-biosemiotics","tag-complexity","tag-documentaries","tag-immanence"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-ja","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1024,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/24\/atheism-and-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1188,"position":0},"title":"atheism and immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's an interesting conversation developing on nature and immanence on an atheist blog. Incidentally, I liked Obama's nod to non-Christians and \"non-believers\" in his inauguration speech. It felt like a refreshing breath of fresh air in the constricted atmosphere of American public religious discourse. With the recent growth of religious\/spiritual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Spirit matter&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6415,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/01\/07\/immanence-goes-to-scoop-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":1188,"position":1},"title":"Immanence goes to Scoop.it","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 7, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Immanence Shadow Blog -- that space where I scoop up little things of interest found on the internet -- has been reinvented and reloaded as scoop.it\/t\/immanence. You can subscribe to it here. The latest piece I've added is the following bit of prescient (or perhaps eternally relevant) American humor:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blog stuff&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/CLjNJI54GMM\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2100,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/03\/planes-of-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1188,"position":2},"title":"Planes of immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. ... Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts.\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/01\/blb31-400x266.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/23\/kauffman-shaviro-goodwin-et-al\/","url_meta":{"origin":1188,"position":3},"title":"Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian\/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1012,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/14\/immanence-transcendence-religion-imagination-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":1188,"position":4},"title":"immanence, transcendence, religion, imagination, politics","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"On the surface, \"immanence\" would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist \"extinctionism,\" et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Eco-theory&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1008,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/01\/immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1188,"position":5},"title":"Immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Immanence suggests co-implication, the implication of one thing in another (spirit in matter, mind in body, movement in repose, humans in nature), nonduality, the vitality of becoming rather than the stasis of being, the sufficiency of life in its generative relational flux, its vessels of light scattered for our gathering\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1967,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions\/1967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}