{"id":5844,"date":"2012-05-04T20:26:58","date_gmt":"2012-05-05T01:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=5844"},"modified":"2012-05-07T20:05:10","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T01:05:10","slug":"nt6a-beatnik-brothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/05\/04\/nt6a-beatnik-brothers\/","title":{"rendered":"NT7: Beatnik brothers…"},"content":{"rendered":"

For what it’s worth, here’s<\/a> the Power Point that went along with my talk. I changed the title to “Beatnik Brothers? Harman’s Objects and the Becoming-Whiteheadian of Deleuze.” I meant “of Deleuzians” (some of whom were in the audience: Manning, Shaviro, Massumi and Hansen I think). The first two slides are the original title (slide) and the revised one.<\/p>\n

The main questions were: What’s at stake in dividing Whitehead from Deleuze? What are the other axes along which we can configure the spectrum of ontological positions?<\/em> (I skipped some of that in the actual talk, but the axes, apart from Harman’s individuality-versus-multiplicity\/blurredness-of-an-object axis, include a morphogenetic “how do complex systems of relations arise?” axis, and the onto-epistemic “how do ontology and epistemology intersect?” axis, and the ethico-political “how do truth-ideas and truth-effects interact?” axis, and others.)<\/p>\n

The final bit of my paper draws on the closing piece of Circus Philosophicus<\/em>:<\/p>\n

These [moments of greater interest to the process-relationalist] are times, for instance, when he suggests that it is not up to us <\/em>to decide to withdraw or re-emerge from our relationless cocoon. It is, as he puts it in the final chapter of Circus Philosophicus<\/em>, up to the things beneath <\/em>us on the scale of objects, the parts that make us up. Sleep overcomes us, and waking overtakes us, not because we decide to do these things. \u201cOnly the zebra\u2019s pieces,\u201d he writes, \u201care able to guide it into new situations of some kind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Free will, Harman continues, \u201cdoes not exist for objects, but only for pieces of those objects.\u201d There is, he says, \u201can excess in our pieces beyond what is needed to create us, and this excess allows new and unexpected things to happen.\u201d It is this way with all objects: \u201cWe are awakened neither by our own powers nor by the world outside, but by the swarming landscape within.<\/em>[\u2026] The dormant zebra, like all other objects, awaits a hailstorm from below.\u201d (CP, 75)<\/p>\n

I find this version of the object more lively, in Jane Bennett\u2019s terms, more Deleuzian even, insofar as it suggests a swarming dynamism within an object that is no longer a black hole of pure withdrawal, but that has become an actual field of relations affecting the object. That this zebra is woken from within \u2013 from its \u201cpieces,\u201d as he puts it (as if the zebra\u2019s body were an Ikea construction) \u2013 does not mean that it cannot also be awoken from without. This is, after all, a zebra Harman sees painted on a flag that is waving in a hailstorm. In this strange closing chapter of a strange book, a chapter framed by an account of Bruno Latour\u2019s hosting the author in his flat in Paris, Harman acknowledges both the strangeness of this idea and the strength of the Latourian burgundy flowing in his blood when this idea seized him.<\/p>\n

Something about this seizure \u2013 the swarm of burgundy, entering Harman\u2019s body from a Parisian glass and filling it over the course of an evening, the swarm of a thought process, ricocheting between a painted zebra waving in the wind and an idea building in the mind of a philosopher \u2013 that tells me that Harman\u2019s objects are affected not just by the pieces within. They are kicked into life because of a world in which what is within and what is without ceaselessly ricochet back and forth across the boundary of a questing selfhood. This, to me, seems as Whiteheadian and Deleuzian as anything.<\/p>\n

Pass the burgundy. You may discover yourself to be a beatnik brother after all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For what it’s worth, here’s the Power Point that went along with my talk. I changed the title to “Beatnik Brothers? Harman’s Objects and the Becoming-Whiteheadian of Deleuze.” I meant “of Deleuzians” (some of whom were in the audience: Manning, Shaviro, Massumi and Hansen I think). The first two slides are the original title (slide) […]<\/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],"tags":[16805,25084,16806],"class_list":["post-5844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","tag-harman","tag-nonhuman-turn","tag-object-oriented-philosophy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-1wg","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7677,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/06\/21\/beatnik-brothers-in-parrhesia\/","url_meta":{"origin":5844,"position":0},"title":"“Beatnik Brothers” in Parrhesia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy\u00a0includes work by Quentin Meillassoux, Tristan Garcia, a review panel discussing\u00a0Katrin Pahl's Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion, and a piece by me on the objects-processes debate in speculative realist philosophy. The latter, entitled \"Beatnik Brothers? Between Graham Harman and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4151,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/25\/the-beatnik-brotherhood\/","url_meta":{"origin":5844,"position":1},"title":"The beatnik brotherhood","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical \"lump\" -- \"pack\" or \"tribe\" might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) -- makes me want to clarify my own\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","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\/05\/tumblr_ljsf0kvMnF1qgjltdo1_500-275x248.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/02\/28\/process-objects-at-the-nonhuman-turn\/","url_meta":{"origin":5844,"position":2},"title":"Process-objects at The Nonhuman Turn","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies. The list of speakers reads like a \"who's who\" of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4103,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/23\/thinking-with-whitehead\/","url_meta":{"origin":5844,"position":3},"title":"Thinking with Whitehead","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Isabelle Stengers's Thinking With Whitehead arrived in the mail today. The publication of the English translation of this tome, a long nine years after the French original, is a genuine Event in the world of process-relational philosophy (or whatever you'd like to name the \"beatnik brotherhood,\" as Harman calls it,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","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\/05\/9780674048034-180x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8278,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/09\/harmans-reply\/","url_meta":{"origin":5844,"position":4},"title":"Harman’s reply","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's reply to my critical response to his book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, which appeared as part of\u00a0a book symposium in\u00a0Global Discourse\u00a0earlier this year, is readable\u00a0online,\u00a0here.\u00a0 I won't address the details of that\u00a0reply here. Some of them relate to our divergent\u00a0interpretations of Latour, and since Harman has\u00a0now written\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1366,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/05\/process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":5844,"position":5},"title":"Process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call \u201cprocess-relational.\u201d This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5844","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=5844"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5849,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5844\/revisions\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}