This blog was added to the Directory of Best Green Blogs earlier today. To honor that I thought I would re-post a link to one of my favorite climate change related videos: the plastic bag polar bears emerging from the subway vent and melting back into them (i.e., the Environmental Defense Fund NYC subway ad campaign video, with music by Stars of the Lid).
(But do we still say "Save the Planet" these days? Can someone come up with a better three-word slogan?)
And then there's GP2 (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a.k.a. the Pacific Trash Vortex), and the artists who are out there now. This from Midway Atoll, near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre:
Folks, do something. First about greenhouse gases, then about the impending ocean aquacalypse, and global poverty, and everything else. Enjoying every minute of it while you're doing it.
(For some reason, this didn't go out over Google Reader, so I'm re-posting it...)
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has been abuzz over the relationship between ontology and politics. Nick Srnicek's post at Speculative Heresy - and the many comments on it - provide a good entry point to this discussion. Nick has wisely redrawn his initial arguments in ways that represent the counter-arguments quite well, so that both (or all) sides seem smarter and more clear-headed coming out of the process than going into it -- which is what good philosophizing should be about.
The key, as he presents it, is to define politics in a viable and useful way: is it just about relations between humans and other humans (as he first assumed), or is it about ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ ‘the space of the im/possible’ (a Derridean formulation that needs more clarification, so see Nick's elaboration on it), or something else. Nick argues that "if we’re not careful, everything becomes politics, and nothing gets changed. Art becomes intrinsically political. Ineffective protests become political (rather than spectacle). Writing blog posts becomes political! Politics – if it is to mean anything, and if it is to escape the nihilism and apoliticism that Nina rightly criticizes – must have a narrower definition than these neutered conceptions of the political."
I agree with Nick that the definition of 'politics' should not be fully subsumed within the definition of 'art' (or 'philosophy' or religion' or 'science' or 'nature' or anything else) -- losing the distinctiveness of each of these terms renders the world less distinct and gives us a weaker grasp on things. But art, philosophy, etc. can still be political, and identifying overlaps between these categories can do important work for us.
Politics, to my mind, is about relationality -- ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ etc. -- but it doesn't just describe that relationality; it affects it. Something becomes political to the extent that it effects change in relations, and specifically in power relations -- that is, to the extent that it opens up, closes down, or somehow reorients or reconfigures capacities (one's own and/or others') for acting and for effecting change in the world.
This seems circular, but I'm trying to be consistent here with a process-relational ontology. To say that 'politics' is about 'effecting change in the ways change can be effected' is to render politics open in a world that is itself open. If voting cannot effect change, then it is not (any longer) political; or rather it is negatively political to the extent that it closes down the possibility for change, for instance, by creating the illusion that one is making change when one isn't. Politics, by this definition, consists of those adjustments, negotiations, and struggles by which we reconfigure power in the world (where power is not just 'power over' but power-to, power-with, etc.). This can be done through art or philosophy, i.e. through the expression or conceptual formulation of new or different ways of relating, to the extent that these then affect actual relations in the world. But it is not identical with them.
And it can be not only between humans, since humans aren't the only entities acting within a shared world. But humans have been pretty effective at changing others' capacities for acting on their worlds, so politics - cosmopolitics, in Stengers' terms - should today be about the nonhuman as well as the human .
Derek Wall at the eco-lefty Another Green World has just alerted us to an excellent piece new Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom has written on the climate change debate. Please read it, ye Copenhagen-bound.
Having just written a piece for Environmental Communication about the promises and pitfalls of cognitive science-based approaches to communicating about issues like climate change, I can't help commenting on this video and blog post that arrived this morning on my blog reader from identity campaigning, re-posted from Cognitive Policy Works. The piece both captures and fails to capture salient issues in this debate...
The author, Joe Brewer, gets it right in arguing that the video successfully applies the following "lessons" from cognitive science:
1) That our thinking works in visual and embodiment-based metaphors: Yes, the video employs the graphic physical embodiment of such metaphors portrayed through movement, gesture, dress, etc.
2) That it "makes climate change sexy": Yes, it does this through the way it elicits, solicits, and interpellates the viewer in a process of desire, a directional build-up whereby we want to "finish the job" of stripping the supermodel. It's left up to us to do that in our imagination. It's now in our hands, like a video-game joystick. (Take that where you will...) This point is made by Brewer's second ("sexy") and fourth (image schemas) arguments. (The latter, his "balance" and "source-path-goal" schemas, are a fancy way of saying that the metaphors are based in the capacities of the body -- for movement toward a goal, for balance, etc.)
3) That it's effective marketing. Indeed. At 160,000 views as I write, it's now had 50,000 more views since he wrote his piece.
But his point that it "deconstructs the fashion industry" is wishful thinking on Joe's part. It plays along with that industry, adding fuel to its workings. (Underwear ads are just as much a part of the industry as are ads for jeans and fur coats, and provoking viewers' desires to see naked bodies doesn't take anything away from clothing manufacturers' ability to sell those bodies clothes.) It adds to the normalization of a certain body image for women: all the models are unhealthily tooth-pick thin women, and all follow the script of how sexy women are supposed to look at their audience of unseen voyeurs. (And did anyone else notice that the more they strip, the more they look 15 years old?) Of course, there's nothing to stop others from doing alternative versions of this featuring non-white models, male strippers, transvestites, or anything else -- which is the argument of the pro-porn feminists, the green fashionistas, et al.
But another thing that strikes me is that the final take-home verbal message -- "If you want to see 350, our natural state, you have to get your politicians to act now" (emphasis added) -- is not conveyed in a visually or metaphorically effective way. When it comes to graphically embodying any kind of action (other than stripping, or being stripped), our cognitive (embodied, visual, metaphorical) mind is left at the door.
The first text comment below the video when I watched it was dagrimreefah's "This media cartel sure is doing a great job on all of you livestock" -- which is probably intended as a witty interjection of climate denialism, but there's a more general point that could be made with that. A quick glance at the rest of the comments tells us a few interesting things:
(1) Most of them refer to the physiques of the models (some of them, wisely, asking to see more -- not less clothing, mind you, but just more healthy flesh covering their bones);
(2) Of those that refer to the science of climate change, a large number deny it and/or politicize it with anti-Obama rhetoric (or with critiques of his compromises); and
(3) Not a single one seems to get the metaphor of "supermodels" being both the women displayed and the ways -- the only ways -- in which we actually know about climate change itself and the role "350 parts per million" plays in it.
Climate change models are highly sophisticated, complex pieces of science that deserve a bit more discussion. Riffing on that, however, would take away from the project of making hegemonic ("common-sensifying") the message about climate change. But I would argue that part of making that message broader is playing up its science (just to raise awareness of how we know about climate change) and, secondly, playing up its ethics and politics: its potential (and already claimed) victims, its costs, and the vested interests on both sides ("old energy" on one, new entrepreneurialism on the other).
Okay, I'm asking too much of a simple 90-second ad. But discussing the ad seems useful, even if it contributes to the viral spread of something I'm ambivalent about...
Just a quick note to let readers know about a new blog that looks in many ways to be a kindred spirit to this one: Violent Signs, subtitled "Immanence, Art, and Ecology," is maintained and moderated by Tim Matts, a Ph.D. candidate at Cardiff, who intends the blog to serve as a forum "for those working with or curious about materialist philosophies of immanence" and to "focus on contemporary strands of poststructuralist thought with an emphasis on the dynamic ‘encounters’ or ‘interface territories’ that subtend and insist between literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, cinema, ecology and technology." In its range of themes, depth of thought, and attractive and evocative visual aesthetic, it's a welcome addition to the eco/geo/philosophical blogosphere.
I loved Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, so I've compiled a list of some useful online resources about the film, book, and author (mostly for my own sake, so I can easily access them if and when I might get around to writing more about it). Just to summarize what I like most about the book and the film:
- Its existential realism: play, fun, mischief, friendship, love, loss, fear, loneliness, change, beginnings and endings... all there, in a kind of holistic mix that brings them all into reflective perspective.
- Its extended-family cameraderie/communalism: Max's "wild things" are a social network of flawed but hearty characters, kinda like reality. And they like to pile on top of each other.
- Its valorizing of the imagination as a place to play (and work) things out, to figure out one's emotions & responses to things, a place for practice (in the sense of preparing for reality, but also in the Buddhist sense of practice being everything).
- That they eat their kings (at least up until Max comes along). Kings need to know their place!
- Max's performance is great.
- Finally, there's the East European Jewishness of the characters (or call it their Italianness, their Slavicity, whatever) -- I mean that quality of being emotionally and bodily there, present, expressive, close to the surface but resonant in the depths, which can be a troubling thing for those not used to it, but which can be lovely. In the film, this is in the the facial, bodily, and emotional expressivity of the acting (if animatronically enhanced puppet/costume/creatures can be said to act). There's a soulfulness to these characters that stays with you long after Max leaves the island.
There's something about the flare-up over Carlin Romano's Chronicle of Higher Ed article "Heil Heidegger!" that manages to crystallize both the virtues and the potential utter barrenness of the web as a site for direct philosophical action (i.e., constructive debate that contributes, however marginally, to philosophy).
Romano's article takes advantage of the forthcoming publication of a translated text by Emmanuel Faye to deliver what he imagines will be a death-blow to Heideggerian studies. Heidegger, Romano claims, was not only a Nazi, in a brief and passing phase of his career, at a time when many Germans were caught up with the political zeitgeist astir in their country and before the really twisted stuff started happening (pogroms and death camps and all). No, he was the philosopher of Nazism, somehow responsible for it through and through.
To anyone who has taken time to study Heidegger, it sounds like a silly argument, or at least a dramatically overdrawn one. So it fails -- if one reads the readers' comments, which at the time of my writing this post have nearly reached a hundred. But if one doesn't read the comments -- which is more likely the case with readers of the Chronicle -- or if one reads them with that skepticism that, among American readers, is all too typically directed at pointy-headed philosophers, "continentalists," theory-headed "academic leftists," and the like -- then the article succeeds. CHE has made its point: Heidegger is out.
The reactions the article has elicited, both in the comments and on other philosophy blogs, have been understandably steaming hot. Reading them makes one feel like a bicyclist silently passing by a massive car pile-up, at which drivers are screaming at each other, taking sides and forming alliances, lobbing pieces of glass and metal at each other, or throwing remains of broken-up cars into a big bonfire and waiting for a cop or an ambulance who, like Godot, will never materialize. It's a little like the eight-minute traffic jam in Godard's mock-apocalyptic Weekend (see above).
walking history's ruins w/ Chris Marker & Arvo Pärt
Michael Moore may be American cinema's best known film essayist (or propagandist, if you like), but the leader of the genre is still alive and kicking, at age 88, living quietly in Paris (no doubt with one or several cats). Chris Marker's Pictures at an Exhibition is a walk through a gallery of his photoshopped détournements commenting on art and world history.
This is, of course, poles apart from agitprop. The combination of rich and affectively engaging imagery (with a kind of cross-historical hyperlinked quality), subtle humor and light-footed pacing, sutured together with Pärt's delicately uplifting music, moves me into the kind of heartfelt meditative space the Buddha would approve of -- as if we're walking alongside Paul Klee/Walter Benjamin's angel of history, in a space capsule hovercraft scanning its monuments, but with humor and gentle compassion and curiosity, coming so close to the bodies lying on the battlefield we can touch them, feel their breath, and maybe give them some solace with our touch.
It helps to know something about Marker's lives, loves, and politics -- perhaps Wolfgang Ball can be encouraged to create a footnoted hypertext analysis of the piece, as he did with Marker's Sans Soleil.
I've written before about William Connolly's notion of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, a description of the cozy relationship that's developed between the economic right and the social-moralistic right over the last couple of decades in the U.S. It's not merely an alliance of converging interests, since the two groups' interests don't always align with each other at all; nor is it only the kind of discursive alliance that poststructuralist analysts like Laclau & Mouffe describe with their notion of hegemony as a process of co-articulation of interests between differently positioned subject-groups. For Connolly, there is also a micropolitical level of resonance that takes in affect, feeling, sensibility, ethos, and other things taking place in pre- and sub-rational dimensions of individual and collective life. (The updated version of Connolly's piece is found in his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style.)
Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, which I just saw a few days ago, is a good example of the effort to forge a popular alternative to that. Moore tries to work on both the cognitive-discursive and the affective levels to, in effect, forge a kind of Christian-socialist-populist resonance machine -- Christian in that it explicitly and repeatedly invokes the Jesus of the gospels (in a kind of reclaiming of the "what would Jesus do" discourse of the evangelicals), socialist in the small-s sense of valuing public control of our institutions, and populist in the way its critical barbs are aimed at, well, mostly bankers.
(On the Christian bit: see Moore's interviews with Sean Hannity, rounds one and two, where the two tangle, sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes less so, over which of them carries Christianity in their heart (among other things). It makes for fascinating viewing...)
(And on the 'socialism': Every political-economic system in the developed world includes some mixture of small-s socialism and small-c capitalism, i.e., some combination of public and private ownership, management, and/or oversight of institutions, where "public", in a democratic context, means by elected officials and "private" means by individuals or corporations pursuing their own goals. The difference is in how the lines are drawn between the two, with the U.S. erring on the side of minimizing the public role and most other countries seeking greater balance. Moore comes in somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, but what he explicitly advocates is not socialism but democracy -- which is another word for public oversight with the details being determined according to what's in the public interest, not in the interest of the wealthy few.)
As a result of its discursive-affective strategy (with part of the latter being citizen Moore's persona) the film won't convert the unconverted unless they're already leaning in this direction. But he does present a handful of tasty informational morsels that will hopefully send some viewers to their computers -- as they did me -- to find out more about them. One of those interesting bits is the idea of "plutonomy," which comes out of a piece of political analysis developed by a trio of Citigroup financial advisors in 2005, well before last year's economic crash. Jodi Dean has helpfully posted the group's report here, along with its follow-up, and I highly recommend reading them. "Plutonomy" is similar to "plutocracy" (rule by the wealthy) and "oligarchy" (rule by a dominant class), except that it is not the direct power of the wealthy as it is its economic force that drives things (thus the "-nomy"). Investopia defines plutonomy as
Several days of silence calls for at least a whimper of sound here... I've been on the road (Washington, DC, Boston, and tomorrow Montreal) and writing for crisp deadlines in amidst the travel. And I'm still uncertain as to whether it's better to post little snippets just to keep the flow coming to your blog readers, or if I should concentrate on lengthier, more considered posts when the opportunity for them arises. Either way, I have been adding to the Shadow Blog, and there's been plenty to add there, most of which I could have said something about here. (Unfortunately I can't control the Shadow Blog's appearance -- that's Google's prerogative -- so some entries come up only as linked titles, while others blare their full length at you.)
But a few things worth mentioning both concern economics:
First, the very pleasant surprise of Elinor Ostrom being awarded a Nobel Prize for it. (The other surprise Nobel I'll leave uncommented upon...) Ostrom is a political scientist whose work on the commons is central to reconceptualizing the human capacity to manage commonly held resources. Her work (along with that of many colleagues) has dealt the death blow to Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" scenario, with its ornery assumption that unless we privatize or bring in the heavy hand of government, humans will destroy their environment inevitably, incessantly, and repeatedly, out of some kind of death drive (or maybe birth drive, an inability to control our own reproduction). That's a simplification, of course, intended provocatively, but it still gets a little maddening to see how captivated students get by the elegant simplicity of Hardin's apocalyptic tale, while being much less interested in the messy complexities of real life as shown by painstaking fieldwork and careful analysis. Ostrom's work shows that commons can be, and often have been, successfully managed -- it just takes the right kind of collective institutions (appropriately scaled, manageable and participatory, with clearly understood responsibilities, etc.). Here's the Nobel committee's justification for their decision, a recent article of Ostrom's from Science for those with institutional subscriptions, and some blog discussions on the topic.
And second, the seismic shifts starting to take place in the field of economics, of which Ostrom's Nobel is one indicator, Paul Krugman's recent NY Times Magazine piece How Did Economists Get it So Wrong? is another, and the growing prominence of behavioral economics is a third. The latter is being incorporated into policy making in the US, as I've written about before, especially now that Cass Sunstein has been confirmed as Obama's regulatory "czar" (he who has been under fire from Glenn Beck for, well, does it matter?). This piece from Britain's funky Prospect Magazine provides more news about how it is also shaping public policy in the U.K.
(Where, though, are our buddies the ecological economists? They need to be taking this opportunity to leap to the forefront of economic debate as well. (I ought to prod my colleagues up the street at the Gund Institute eco-eco think-tank to see what they have to say...)
The idea of the commons is central to Ostrom's work and, incidentally, is also at the heart of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's third and final installment of their much loved / drooled over / berated (hopefully not in equal measure) Empire trilogy. (Are they the George Lucas of sociopolitical theory, or the Darth Vader?) Following up on Multitude, this one's titled Commonwealth. They are the inspirational writers of the Spinozan (post-Marxist) left, and I'm eager to see where they've taken things (despite the weaknesses of the previous volumes, as outlined, for instance, by some of the articles here).
Re-Public put out a very nice special issue on the commons a while back, though it focuses more on the technological commons than the ecological ones, and the issues faced by the two are not always the same. I would also recommend Re-Public's environmental justice issue, and Steven Shaviro's (and others') more recent analyses of the economic crisis. And see On the Commons for more of this kind of thing.
Before Ken Burns' 6-part, 12-hour series on the national parks was aired, a perceptive article by the LA Times' Scott Timberg warned that it might be greeted by "sharp knives." Ten years in the making, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, finally came to our television screens last week, and so far no sharp knives seem to have been drawn. But there have been blunt forks poking into the meat and leaving large parts of the six-course meal undigested on the plate, its servings a bit too super-sized for easy consumption. (There are, of course, the stealth knives and box-cutters of right-wing bloggers, who criticize the series for its NPR liberalism, communism, paganism, and whatever else, but so far the jabs have been mostly off the mark, and few and far between.)
The US national park system would seem to make for an ideal subject for the Burns treatment -- a treatment Apple has captured, at least in part, on its iPhoto program as the "Ken Burns Effect." Timberg describes the Burns style as a "combination of a deep, authoritative male voice, pan-and-zoom camera work over sepia-toned photographs, period music and extravagant claims about American exceptionalism." The Washington Post's Tim Page has less charitably called Burns' style an "unreflected populist Hallmark-ese," a "strange mixture of New Deal and New Age." The latter was said in reference to Burns' "Jazz" series, with its idea that improvisation was an integral element of the American spirit, but it could easily also be said about National Parks.
But there's something to Burns' claim about improvisation: one finds that improvisational spirit in the pragmatism of the country's best philosophers (John Dewey, William James, et al) and in the poetry of Whitman, the Beats, and the nature romanticism of Thoreau and Muir. All of which is another way of saying that progressivism, the very backbone of the American conservation movement (the national parks being one wing of that, the national forests being another), is very American, and those who forget that -- like today's rabid Republican right -- are not nearly as American as they would like to think.
This is one of my favorite scenes from the David Attenborough-narrated Planet Earth series... The music is toned down, soft and sparse and a little eerie, some of the cinematic apparatus (at least the lights of the submersible) is displayed on camera, and we get a hint of the umwelt of a very strange creature, before that creature "disappears into the blackness," rather like Graham Harman's objects disappearing into the density of their tool-being...
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, so I'm grateful he's taken the time he has to deal with the substance of my complaint.) But I'm of course not the only one pursuing the resonances between Whitehead and Deleuze: Shaviro, Stengers, Keith Robinson, James Williams, and Michael Halewood (and to some extent, at least, Eric Alliez and Jeffrey Bell) are among the others doing that. Not that that makes any of us right -- and to the extent that Harman is correct about all this, his arguments should interest the others.
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 would take more time and energy than I currently have. For that reason, I'm not asking for or expecting a response from Graham, but since he reads this blog, he may as well know that I need more convincing.)
The photos are a bit too beautiful to resist sharing. And the stories taken from the archive of the already screened: "like scenes from Mad Max," "like waking up on Mars," "like a nuclear winter morning". . . White urban Australia's dreamtime apocalypse of being taken over by the Outback, the uncanny aboriginal sacred that still haunts the landscape, as cinematized in Peter Weir's Last Wave and countless other Australian films. Somewhere in there one can find a climate change signature, or at least an El Nino initial. Jon Snow writes:
I agree with Mediacology's critique of Derrick Jensen's 'dark side' -- or at least of a certain linearity in his political vision -- but I still find his Star Wars spoof pretty funny. And I think it's good to have someone saying the things he says (like these). And his column does add some fire to Orion magazine, which as the reigning most beautiful environmental mag, has always been better with the other three elements (air, water, earth) than with the fire.
fairy villages, bowerbird art, & other ambiguous objects
One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments -- often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) -- by individuals, designed or improvised with materials at hand, working with others less by design than by happenstance. They can be found in outdoor public spaces, wooded ravines and forests, wild patches of cities and countryside, abandoned industrial sites. Remaining little documented, they appear not to exist at all except when directly encountered, which is something that usually happens by chance.
Even calling them ‘artworks’ can be problematic, since they may not be created with the intent of being recognized as art, or made by ‘artists’, and certainly not as part of the ‘art system’ (as Bourdieu, Luhmann, or Stallabrass would define it). Insofar as they assert the (past) presence of those who have crafted them, they can be read as forms of graffiti, or a kind of resistant creativity akin to the guerrilla gardening movement of urban space activists. Marking out a space as different and significant, but leaving behind little direct evidence of the intent underlying them, they may convey an aura of mystery, playfulness, childlike wonder, or the more serious character of a sacred space or shrine, but until they are turned into a public topic (as has occurred with the fairy houses on Monhegan Island, where I just spent a few days, and about which more in a moment), they remain ambiguous and a little unplaceable within the systems of things that make up the recognized world. They are anomalous or ambiguous objects, which makes them relevant to the recent discussion here of objects versus relations.
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 Harmanof 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.)
More on Harman, or what's outside the system of relations?
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.
things slip away... (on Harman's Latourian object lessons)
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.
I’ve been reading Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. More accurately, I’ve been dipping into and sipping from the first and systematically digesting the second. Given the amount of blogging that goes on under the rising star(s) of ‘object-oriented philosophy,’ ‘speculative realism,’ and Graham Harman himself, I figure it’s okay and may even turn out productive for me to air some of my reactions in public.
To start with, I will say that Graham is one of the most engaging, entertaining, enjoyable, rhetorically satisfying, and utterly lucid of the contemporary philosophers I have read in recent memory. And his project, as far as I can discern it so far, is of fairly direct relevance to the thinking through of socio-ecological issues, or at least to the philosophical working-out of some of the dilemmas, the conceptual blockages and theoretical miasmas, that have made it difficult for us to think our way through the complex socio-ecological issues that confront us.
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.
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.)
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.
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."
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