I imagine, though, that for the actual grad students and untenured academics who probably make up the bulk of AAAARG's membership (along with some voracious intellectuals outside academe who have no access to a university library, and librarians or publishers' employees subverting the system from within), most of these aren't very realistic options. (For one thing, the book is probably out of the library in some professor's office when you need it most.) And part of the value of a site like AAAARG is that it brings all these materials together in one place and -- although the site doesn't exploit this nearly as much as it could -- that it can generate conversations about and around them in the process of making them available. So in addition to being a kind of dream library -- because of the selection, but also because the books are always there on the shelf, to be read (or downloaded) whenever you need it -- a site like this could also be a reading room and a virtual cafe with speakers, conversations, performative denunciations and adulations and rousing manifestos, and whatever else might happen when a bunch of intellectuals gather together around their favorite authors.

That little bit of (not so) utopian fantasizing aside, there's something about wandering the aisles of this library that feels less like sitting in the comfortable couch of a Barnes and Noble or, better yet, one's favorite local bookstore that's somehow survived the onslaught of the chain stores -- or for that matter even the pages of Amazon, with all its reviews and commentary -- and that feels more like sneaking through the porn section of a video rental joint. The titles are written in black ink on white covers, with little or no information about them until you load them in your VCR. Some of them are misfiled or mistitled. Many have fingerprints all over (notes in the margins, black bands running down the sides of a bad photocopy job). There's no colorful display of the current hot sellers, the store manager's and employees' selection of current favorites, or discounted copies of publisher's deleted titles. And certainly no coffee.

So what do we make of this new tug-of-war, which echoes the skirmishes between record companies and Napster-inspired mp3 file-sharers, and all the many variations of the intellectual property rights game to be played out on similar battlefields in years to come? I know that information "wants to be free," and that the same should go for knowledge and ideas. But I also know that there's a price to be paid for their production: even if most scholarly books generate little if any profit, if the publishers didn't make their money back -- at least some of it (where they're supplemented by institutional subsidies, private endowments, government grants, and the like) -- then it wouldn't be possible to produce those hand-held, flippable paper-and-ink bundles the world has come to know and love.

As with media, music, and everything else these days -- witness the recent agreement between Google and publishers, libraries, and authors' guilds, which has advanced things somehow, but no one seems to agree exactly how -- we are (pace Yeats) struggling toward Bethlehem to be born... into a new model of digitally accessed texts with flexible copyrights, scalable pricing, incentive, and availability structures, and other things we couldn't have dreamed of just a few years ago. Part of the pressure for a new model is coming from publishers (and record producers, et al.) who don't want to see their profits continue falling -- or their losses escalating. But part of it comes from those who are setting the data free by opening up one space after another where it can be freely exchanged. This is good, because it shows us that the baseline assumptions about access and availability have changed and that we need to address the new assumptions -- about information's "wanting to be" free -- directly. And if a few dinosaurs like the music industry giants end up collapsing of their own weight in the process, then so it goes. What's important here is the flow of knowledge and creativity and the possibility of making a living at it, but not necessarily every single way to profit from others' knowledge and creativity. The latter constitutes a second layer built atop the first, a layer that in some respects might be expendable at the end of the day.

Public libraries are still around, at least in the better places to live, but many are struggling and not keeping up well with the expanding needs of our day. And I think the baseline question has changed from how to make things available -- that's easy: you put them online -- to how to provide ways of compensating their producers so as to keep them wanting to produce more of them. What kinds of arrangements will provide incentives for those who do the work that others value? Beyond popularity alone, alongside a guaranteed minimum wage (well, okay, let's leave that one aside until the next utopian moment), what else would an author want or need? Open access theorists have thought about this and devised some simple but flexible incentive structures (such as Creative Commons licenses and other things), but we're a long way from figuring it all out yet.

As for AAAARG, most of its authors are either scholars, who make a living not from their writings but from the (public or private) institutions that support them -- and who might be quite happy to allow other scholars to access their books without buying them -- or else they're dead. (Or both.) Neither Plato nor Foucault will care if you steal their book or pay forty-five dollars for its latest edition, and those who care about that on their behalf are, arguably, following the old model. As for whether John Law, John Mullarkey, or Elizabeth Grosz will mind that I recommended their PDFs to my students because hard copies were so expensive or difficult to find in this form, I don't know. I guess I'll wait and see if anyone tells me I shouldn't have.

See the Institute for the Future of the Book's if:book blog for some good thinking on these topics.

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 Dangerous), for instance:

"Where today we tend to think of character almost exclusively as a moral or ethical property, character should probably be thought as “power” (in the sense of “capacity” or “ability”, or what a thing can do), or “nature” (in the sense of the “nature of a thing”, not in the sense of φύσις). In this respect, ἦθος is closely bound up with the Greek concept of arete or “excellence” (ἀρετή), which would later become the Latin virtus, which, importantly, has connotations of power (in the sense of capacity or ability) and strength. Again, it is sad how degraded the concept of virtue has become worn or degraded. The key point not to be missed with respect to the Greek concept of ἀρετή is that ἀρετή is not an exclusively human property. All entities, for the Greeks, have their “ἀρετή“, and in many respects this ἀρετή constitutes the proper being of an entity. Thus, for example, the ἀρετή of a hawk is its keen eyesight, its sharp talons, its ability to fly swiftly, and so on. The ἀρετή of a tree might be its sturdiness, the manner in which it reaches to the heavens, its ability to resist heavy winds, and so on. The Greeks, it would seem, were Deleuzian ethologists well before Deleuze, defining entities in terms of their powers, capacities, or excellencies, rather than qualities."

What follows are some comments on Levi's response to my concerns (which he identifies correctly) about object-oriented ontology's premise of the absolute independence of objects from each other.

This suggestion in Bryant's and Harman's work that objects "withdraw" from our (i.e., any observer's) full knowledge of them is attractive to me, in part, because it provides a recognition that we cannot know things without affecting them -- that practices of knowledge-making are always practices of acting on the world. (This is something that both Latour's actor-network theory and John Law's notion of science as enactive "method assemblage" acknowledge, as do certain other forms of post-positivist philosophy of science.) Harman's insistence that objects do not "touch" still seems odd to me, and inconsistent with Bryant's acknowledgment of objects' "splitness," since the latter implies that at least one side of an object touches at least one side of another object. But I'll leave that difference for the two of them to work out.

I also like Levi's summary of Althusserian social theory and its "cascade of consequences" for French social theory since then. His argument is that had French social theory not ignored the part-within-whole "meriology" of relations between societies and the parts that make them up (individuals, social groups, etc.), then we would no longer be searching

"for the “Christ-point” in these endo-relational structures of the “empty square”, “degree zero”, “void”, or “subject”. Rather, the issue would become that of investigating how objects can act on one another, how they interact, and how it is possible for objects that are parts of another object to change the object of which they are a part. For example, how is it possible for a group – what Guattari, following Sartre, called a “subject-group” – to act on and change the endo-relational structure of the social object in which its enmeshed but from which it is nonetheless autonomous. And here one of the central questions would be one of how to navigate the autopoietic feedback loops that characterize the endo-relational structure of the social object as it strives to regulate the smaller scale objects of which it is composed, but from which it is nonetheless distinct. These feedback loops are points in phase space, limiting the basins of attraction of the social system. The issue here becomes that of how to avoid being enmeshed in these tendencies, feedback loops, or attractors such that ones actions simply end up re-enforcing the endo-relational of the structure, and how it is possible to push social systems into new basins of attraction without generating catastrophe. The point, however, is that there is already an autonomy within these systems. The question is that of how it is possible to act on the endo-relational organization of these systems." (emphasis added)

This is very nicely put, and it's a good reason for social theorists to look beyond the post-Althusserian school for an understanding of how social change comes about.

As an aside, I just want to point out a very minor quibble regarding Levi's use of ecological theory: "An ecological system," he writes, "is one object. It has a unique endo-relational structure that makes it act as one. But this ecological system both contains other ecological systems (for example, the ecology of a single tree in a rain forest), and contains other objects (frogs, trees, insects, soil, droplets of water, bacteria, birds, etc., etc., etc.)." This, however, reflects an outdated view of ecosystems, which has been rejected by the majority of scientific ecologists. An ecosystem is now generally seen as a convenient abstraction, but not a genuine entity, or at least not one that "acts as one" in any meaningful sense, i.e., in relation to its environment. The boundaries of an ecosystem cannot be pinned down definitively the way that the boundaries of an organism, more or less, can (with, of course, openings that make possible an inflow and outflow of energy, etc.). The same point, I think, would apply to social systems, at least as we know them today. But in principle the argument here remains sound, as one could find other examples that fit it well.

Now, back to the main issue of objects and relations. Levi summarizes Harman's objections to relationalism (which he agrees with), saying, first, that "Harman argues that were objects nothing but the totality of their relations to all other objects then 1) objects would be nothing but a hall of mirrors with no being at all (i.e., there must be something independent of relations to account for the being of objects), and 2) we would be unable to account for the conditions under which change is possible."

To the first point here, I would argue that a hall of mirrors, or whatever metaphor one uses here, is still a something: every hall of mirrors is a particular hall of mirrors, a particular set of relations that has come together in its own way and that continues in time to be always an ever differing/deferring hall of mirrors as it continues to interact with other such (halls of) mirrors. If we wish to call a particular hall of mirrors (identified by slicing through time and pointing to a cross-section of the whole mirror-laden lattice of the world) an "object", we can certainly do that. And if we wish to argue that such an object remains the same object as long as it retains a certain structure (a certain configuration of relations between the mirrors that make it up) and becomes a different object when that structure becomes altered by more than a certain trivial degree (in which case we would have to specify at what point the trivial becomes the significant), then we can do that, too. All of that would follow very useful and common-sensical precedents in coming to grips with the world.

Clarifying Harman's second argument, Bryant adds that "Harman’s point is that were objects the totality of their relations to all other objects in the universe we’d get a crystalline universe where structure is fixed and no change can take place." But here, again, this point seems to me to be merely asserted rather than argued (though I'm sure the arguments appear elsewhere). Bryant had defined Whitehead's and Latour's "ontological relationist" variants of "object-oriented ontology" as the view in which "objects are constituted by their relations to everything else in the universe." A more thorough relationist might argue that objects as such don't really exist; they are, rather, a perceptual artifact, an effect or appearance arising out of a particular relationship, which is the relationship between an observer or subject (something that becomes subjective through a process of subjectivation) and an object or set of objects (the things that become objective to that subject in that moment). An object emerges only in relation to a subject; objectivity is co-emergent with subjectivity. That is, objects alone do not exist, nor do subjects, except insofar as they arise within a system of relations within which objectivity and subjectivity co-emerge.

To say that "subjectivity emerges" is to say that there is perception, feeling, response, and thus agency, even if it be the miniscule amount of it (relative to what we're used to) that one finds in an amoeba or a cell or something even more microscopic. And to say that "objectivity emerges" is to say that something comes into existence which appears real, hard, solid, and which in turn becomes part of the world being responded to the next moment. All of this emerges within every drop of experience, with the universe being experience all the way down (or forward). Since the minutest particle of universe involves an opening, a capacity to act in one direction or another, then creativity and novelty arise, which in turn affect other things (events) and give rise to the lumpy and complexly networked universe that we have.

At the same time, no particular set of such relations (or any relations -- between objects and subjects, between "halls of mirrors", etc.) is identical to any other one. It is only when one conceives of relations as themselves effects or artifacts, i.e. as unchanging (in effect) objects (irony or ironies?), that a relational universe begins to appear crystalline. But relations are not that way. They are moments of becoming (Whitehead's "actual occasions"), made up of perception, feeling, experience, and agency, structured according to the bipolarity of subjectivation (interiority) and objectivation (exteriority).

If the universe is indeed made up of such experiential events, moments of concrescence which come together to form larger emergent networks (e.g., "societies" in Whitehead's terms) -- and if the universe is therefore fundamentally a creative universe -- and recall that Whitehead, Deleuze, and Bergson all strove to account for how creativity and novelty can arise -- then there is no reason to assume that relations remain static, that all relations are identical to all others, and that every "hall of mirrors" simply mirrors all the other mirrors in exactly the same way, all the way down. At least I don't see why that should be.

A final comment: Anyone interested in a more thorough articulation of Bryant's onticology would do well to start with his manifesto and its follow-up. One curiosity that struck me as I was reading it is that Levi refers repeatedly to the Kantian revolution as the "Copernican revolution." This is a wonderful analogy to make, but for one thing: the two were, in many ways, each other's opposites. Where Copernicus took humanity out of the center of the physical universe, Kant (with Descartes as his predecessor) placed humanity back in the center of the mental universe -- thereby fixing ever more firmly into place the division of labor between scientists (let's call them the Copernicans), who study the objective workings of "nature", and philosophers (the Kantians), who account for the subjectivity of the human.

Object-oriented ontology, and anti-correlationist speculative realism more broadly, seems want to decenter both of these moves at once by bringing humans back into the thick of things -- as one thing (or, rather, many things) among others. That is, it aims to spread the "center" out across all things and relations. I'm all for that. My hunch, however, is that by putting most of their energies toward getting away from Kant (the mental), we move a little too quickly toward the physicalism of Copernicus. What we need is a balance between these two moves, the post-Kantian and the post-Copernican, a balance that recognizes subjectivity and objectivity as co-emergent and as both, together, diffused throughout the world. Whether we call the things of that world "objects" or "relations" (or "processes," which I often prefer over "relations") is less important than that we move away not just from the nature/culture and ideal/material dichotomies but also from the subject/object dichotomy. I guess that objectology just rubs me the wrong way because it's not also, simultaneously, a subjectology -- or if it is (and I'm starting to be convinced that it may be), that it's name doesn't reflect that.

As always, all of this comes with the caveat that I am reacting to blog posts rather than to the entirety of either Harman's or Bryant's work (which I've now read bit and pieces of, but not nearly enough). I'm genuinely grateful that they even bother to entertain my criticisms in this format (as opposed to arguments expounded in books or journal articles, which are much more carefully thought through, rigorously reviewed, etc., but which move so much more slowly). And I know that none of us really has the time to be blogging so much when we should be writing and doing all the other things academics do. The occasional flurry (like this) is enjoyable, but I don't want to make them feel pressured to respond (nor indeed to have that pressure come back to me!).

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 and the world at the expense of the world itself (with all its other things, beings, entities, relations, and whatnot), then is it better to promote a philosophy that focuses on objects, that is, not just on human subjects/objects but all objects, or one that focuses on relations between things (subjects, objects, networks, processes, whatever)? The first approach is taken by object-oriented philosophers like Bryant, Graham Harman, and others; the second by relationists, such as those influenced by Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, and Spinoza, among others (though the exact list depends on whom you ask; a few recent and recommendable books in this latter tradition are Steven Shaviro’s Without Criteria, John Protevi’s Political Affect, and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter).

Since I’ve responded to Levi’s points on his blog, I'll restrict myself here to addressing in greater depth the question raised by Levi, Scu, and anxiousmodernman (in their comments) about the politics of relationalism.

Levi writes: “Politically, unless we begin from the premise that terms are ontologically distinct from their relations, I don’t see how anything like emancipation or change is possible. Badiou has understood this well. It is only where you have a radical ontological nominalism or independence of terms from their relations that it’s possible to reconfigure relations. Where, by contrast, relations are ontologically internal to their terms this sort of change is not possible.”

What I’ve objected to in Levi’s description of relations (as I have in the past to Graham Harman’s) is the argument that a relational picture of the universe leaves us with no way of understanding difference, uniqueness, and change. If things are nothing but their (internal and external) relations, then the world somehow must become a lumpy mass of undifferentiated wholeness. As Levi puts it (correcting for typos here, since this was a quick reply to a comment of mine), "Ontologically, if objects are their relations it would be impossible for change to take place. The universe would become a crystalline and static lattice because it wouldn’t contain any alterity within it in excess of relations. Additionally, nothing at all would exist because where everything is a mirror or relation to everything else there is nothing at all."

But this isn't a fair description of a relational understanding of things. Just as an object-oriented ontology takes note of distinctions between different kinds of objects (shapes, sizes, etc.), so a process-relational ontology takes note of distinctions between different relational processes: fast and slow, thick and thin, complex and simple, extensive and intensive, linear and multilateral, hierarchical and decentralized or egalitarian, etc. Relational processes have unfolded historically in ways that have given the world its highly complex and variable textures: its folds, thicknesses, speeds, movements, rhythms, consistencies, patterns, trajectories. That we find ourselves in amidst these folds, rhythms, and trajectories does not imply that we don't exist or that we cannot act. We are our actions (including our reactions, deliberations, etc.); we are not separate from them. But a single action, such as brushing one's teeth, hardly exhausts the things that one is doing at a give moment (glancing at the mirror, remembering what one looked like yesterday or as a child, thinking of what to say to one's spouse upon re-entering the bedroom, digesting and experiencing pains associated with that, firing neurons, pumping blood, etc.). Since "I," the one brushing teeth (which I do as a series of habitual movements), am fully intertwined with/in a material body, a form of lively matter that carries with it all sorts of capacities including those that are put into motion when we remember things, act on impulses or habits, etc., then there is always much more going on than "I" think "I" am doing. Consciousness is just one small (but important) piece of it all.

"I" am not restricted to "my body" nor to a given state of "mind." But "I" am also not a permanent, self-subsistent entity that is separate from my relations (including those "I" may be conscious of but probably many, many more of those that "I" am unconscious of but mutually co-dependent with). What am "I," then? A congealment of consistency, creativity (capacity for action), and recognition to which I ascribe the subjective identifiers “I,” “me,” “mine.” These congealments are changing, dynamic processes, which wouldn’t arise if there wasn’t an action of self-ascription. But it’s all action, all process, all becoming; there’s nothing permanent “behind” it. There’s certainly a carry-over from one moment to the next, a memory that persists through duration, existing simultaneously with the perception of the world that arises moment to moment, with both always changing, renewing, recalibrating, structurally coupling with its environment and accessing its available resources (available in and through the materiality of what it carries with it and of what it encounters). It winds its way up, works its way through various occasions (relational encounters, etc.) and eventually winds its way down, smoothly and slowly or quite suddenly, becoming something quite different (which it is always doing to some extent, but which it fully does only when the recognizable human social-body-subject "dies").

This is "my" life, my being-towards-death if that's how I choose to think of it (as Heidegger would) or simply my appearing-amidst-constant-appearance/disappearance. Ultimately it is not "mine," because "I" was never there as a solid entity, nor will I ever be. I am present in my action at this very moment, acting on capacities, affordances and effectivities (to use J. J. Gibson's language), present when I wake up and "come to," and then present again when I come to the next time and connect that moment to the one I carry in "my" body-memory-materiality. Where am I when I am sleeping? Of course, there is no "I" except when "I-ness" winks into existence; the continuity of that "I-ness" is a result of carrying things forward. (This is a pretty Bergsonian way of describing things, consistent both with Whitehead and with Deleuze, but also with Buddhist onto-phenomenalism.)

Yet, finding ourselves continually within a social and relational world within which we are causally (or karmically, to use an Asian term meaning essentially the same thing) intertwined, having capacities for tremendous acts of empathy/sympathy and for grotesque acts of antipathy, our "I-ness" is inflected with ethical potential because of its very openness, its very ability to do either this or that or something else. And the complex sociality of our world also allows us to formulate patterned ways of interacting -- and so, to develop and implement social contracts, standards and rules, and the like, or, for that matter, to contravene them, change them, agitate for more egalitarian conditions, etc.

This description of the world is really not that different from an object-oriented description except that it explicitly recognizes the temporality of what it is describing. But that difference to me seems crucial. It is a description that assumes that the world is made up of verbs rather than nouns. Now, this analogy of language would suggest that a more accurate description of the world may be one that includes both verbs and nouns, i.e., both processes and things -- enduring, consistent, and relatively obdurate things. And that’s fine. But it’s the relative consistency or fluidity that is the key here, because there is nothing that stays the same eternally, at least not in a process-relational worldview. Such a view recognizes temporality as central, whereas an object-oriented view will tend toward forgetting it because of the assumptions of (relative) permanence, stability, and self-subsistency that come with the idea of "objects."

So what I'm suggesting is that a relational approach gets at politics better than a non-relational one, since it allows us to focus on the qualities of relations, their fairness and evenhandedness, and on the processual nature of everything, e.g. on life processes from their emergence to their disappearance. This sounds a bit teleological in an Aristotelian fashion, i.e. with the implication that everything has its natural process of flourishing that, all else being equal, we should allow to unfold. There is something like that -- a respect for process -- in a relational (i.e., process-relational) ethic. There is also the possibility of throwing up one's hands and saying, "Well, everything dies in the end anyway, so what does it matter?" But will an object-oriented ethic, one that says that "all objects are like this," "all deserve this kind of treatment," etc. -- i.e., a post-anthropocentric Kantianism, which seems the natural destination for an object-oriented ethic, if I'm reading it correctly -- convince someone who isn't interest or capable of kindness and compassionate we-feeling? Conviction and commitment arise out of experience, with all its emotional engagement, not out of a merely rational assent to doctrines and rules.

In response to Scu’s question about relational theory’s commitment to egalitarianism and its applicability to concrete situations: I know it’s easy to think of examples of traditional forms of relational philosophy, such as those developed in Asia (Buddhism, Taoism, et al.) as well as in non-Christian western and indigenous contexts, and to argue that the societies within which these developed did not give rise to the kind of egalitarian thinking that emerged in Western culture. Buddhist and Taoist philosophers certainly had a lot to say about liberation, and also some to say about egalitarianism, but Indian, South-East Asian, Chinese, and Japanese societies in general did not develop and put into practice the kinds of concepts of individual rights that we consider “egalitarian” today.

This, however, abstracts philosophy from a whole cultural milieu in a way that is too simplistic and deterministic (and that could cut in more directions than one). There was much else going on in those societies than just philosophy and politics, and the one (philosophy) was hardly the unique causal determinant of the other (politics), or vice versa. Also, one can offer plenty of counterexamples, such as indigenous societies (say, those of Australian Aborigines or South American rainforest dwellers), that were relatively egalitarian and relational-holistic in their outlooks. (There are many possible debates here, but the argument has been made repeatedly, e.g. by Pierre Clastres, David Turnbull, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Stanley Diamond, Murray Bookchin, David Graeber, and others; and while most of these are somewhat dated, the tradition persists). And there are good cases of relational philosophers -- Spinoza (most obviously), Deleuze, Foucault and other poststructuralists among them -- whose politics are egalitarian in a fairly strong sense of the word. Within environmental ethics/philosophy, relational approaches include Arne Naess's Spinozan "deep ecology," John Cobb's Whiteheadian process ecotheology, Joanna Macy's Buddhist eco-ethics, and many versions of ecofeminism. They contrast in this respect with the more individualist forms of animal ethics such as Peter Singer's utilitarianism or Tom Regan's deontological ethics, or the bio-(not eco-)centrism of Paul Taylor, Holmes Rolston, and others.

Relationalism, however, comes in many forms. I think of actor-network theory as a form of relationalism, since its analyses (of which there are many, in such fields as science and technology studies, organizational studies, human/cultural geography, etc.; see, for instance, John Law’s book After Method for reference to various examples) focus on the processes by which networks of various kinds, extents, stabilities, obduracies, etc. are formed and hold together or fail to hold together over time. Harman has made Latour out to be an ‘objectologist’ rather than a ‘relationalist,’ but I think his work more naturally falls into the tradition of relational theorizing. (Since few studies of actor-network theory have been concerned with this object/relation debate, they haven’t bothered to make that point, but most, to my knowledge, take for granted that Latourian ANT shares more with other processual-relational approaches than with other kinds of theoretical frameworks.) Perhaps less contentiously, the same can be said of Deleuzian and most other poststructuralist approaches, and, to varying degrees, to those found in biosemiotics, Gibsonian ecological psychology, Batesonian systems theory, and certain other fields. These are all quite different, and they are just a sampling of some that I have found useful (for a few others, see Dan Little’s post from yesterday on relations, processes, and activities). But they generally prioritize relations over things, processes over fixed structures, and they have been “translated into concrete situations” in that they are used as research methodologies or analytical approaches in a range of scholarly work. Various kinds of Marx-inspired dialectical approaches (such as those found in the work of geographers David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Neil Smith, and others) also focus on processes rather than objects, though these sometimes err towards over-reifying capitalism -- which is very much in the nature of the Marxian project. (And which has its virtues; but a good antidote to that overreification is found in J. K. Gibson-Graham's The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It) and A Postcapitalist Politics.)

As for relationalism's capacity for egalitarian (strictly speaking) politics, that too is a tricky question. Before one can evaluate the extent of egalitarianism versus non-egalitarianism (i.e., hierarchy or various kinds of class, gender, race, or species bias, etc.) in a certain context, one must specify what it is that is being compared. If it’s people, then egalitarianism requires treating human individuals equally. If it’s cultures (as in cultural relativism, as popularized in many anthropological studies), then it’s social/cultural collectives. If it’s objects, then… well, one would have to define what qualifies as an object and what doesn’t -- which perhaps is where object-oriented approaches need to spend a fair bit of time (which is where I would get exasperated if I had to do that). On the other hand, if it’s cultural-ecological ensembles/assemblages/networks, as in some environmental anthropological work, then one either has to find clear boundaries around such assemblages (which cultural ecologists in the 1960s and 1970s tried to do, but their work has since been critiqued for reifying said cultures and ecosystems in unrealistic ways), or one has to focus on relations. In the best of such work, one focuses on both, and on multiple scales of relations and organizational structures/systems/networks.

But maybe there is a difference here after all... It's quite possible that an object-oriented ontology makes it easier to measure things that are fundamentally of the same kind (objects as defined in such and such a way), and is therefore more amenable to egalitarianism to the extent that "equality" is considered a kind of sameness that is distributed across a certain set of entities. A relational ontology, on the other hand, prefers to focus not on equality but on qualitivism -- that is, the notion that we should act in a way that preserves and enhances the quality of relations. I’ve argued elsewhere for an “ethic of circulating agency,” where what we value is that the ability to act, to pursue one’s goals, to respond to others, to grow and to flourish, is kept in motion , i.e., that it is actively distributed across the terrain within which the capacity emerges for such action, pursuit, responsiveness, and growth. I have yet to develop that idea in any philosophical depth, but I think it’s consistent with a poststructuralist and post-constructivist process-relational approach to politics.

Enough on that for now. I should end by mentioning how this relational philosophizing is working its way into my writing at the moment. Some of it has appeared throughout my work on landscape, space and place, environmental conflicts, and the various cultural dimensions of these things (such as in my book Claiming Sacred Ground). In the past, I had been concerned more with working my way out of a "social constructionist" frame, or rather out of the realist-constructivist dichotomy (see, e.g., this shorter piece here or this more extended, theoretical article, which is heavy on actor-network theory but somewhat preliminary and undertheorized in its discussion of other approaches; both are several years old now). Various cultural-ecological case studies that I've worked on over the years are being worked over into my book "Ecologies of Identity," which is still some time away from being completed; the philosophical content there, however, is subsumed within a more broadly political and historical argument about emergent global public/media space and globalist and anti-globalist projects within that space. My film book, however, has been growing more philosophical as I write it -- in fact, I've come to thinking of it as an "ecophilosophy of the cinema." So that's one place where some of these ideas will be worked out in greater depth, at least in terms of how they relate to cinematic perception. I'm hoping to have that completed before the summer, and out whenever it comes out, so watch for it if you're interested.

Valery Lyman's 16-minute film, One of These Mornings, captures the pain, the joy, the happiness, and the excitement embodied in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.

Now, a year and a couple of months after that election, Ben Ehrenreich's Slate piece on the dramatic failures (already!) of the international, but especially US, response to the Haiti earthquake disaster, Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?, forces us to confront the fact that changing the world is not brought about by an election. If Ehrenreich and others are right, it appears that through a combination of knee-jerk militarism, systemic racism, and the pursuit of economic interest even in the midst of tragedy, Haiti's most needy have not been getting much of the relief that the global community has generously sent out through personal donations via social networking media alongside traditional aid channels. That's a scandal in itself, and it calls for serious reflection on why so little has changed in this country.

The other big moment of contradiction this past week was the U.S. Supreme Court decision about corporate "personhood" and unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns -- which is the biggest single setback to democracy this country has seen in a long time. But, there being a silver lining to every dark cloud, this may also be the moment for Obama to step in and take the reins of his multiple-majority power lock and do something with them. (Why is it when Bush had to work with a Democratic majority in Congress he still managed to do so much damage, and when Obama has clear majorities in both houses, his hands are tied? We know, of course, that it's largely because of the beholdenness of all American politicians, wimpy "moderate" Democrats no less than others, to the special interests who fund them -- which the Supreme Court decision has just made that much worse.)

The decision is an easy target for Obama, and at least some of the more moderate Republicans (such as McCain, who's initiated campaign finance reform in the past) as well as Democrats would be hard-pressed to support the decision. As he prepares for his State of the Union address this Wednesday, any American who supports him should take some time in the next couple of days to send a message to the the White House and to, at the very least, sign the MoveOn.org petition against the Supreme Court decision. For this "progressive" president to act on his promises, he needs to feel the country behind him. One step can lead to another, generating momentum for at least some of the change he had promised; but that first step has to be taken.

Real change is not brought about by a single election, nor by the expression (audacious or otherwise) of hope. It's brought about by the hard work of enacting that hope into practice. Once the conditions are set for a moment of good feeling like that embodied in Valery Lyman's film, we need to ensure these remain not just moments but movements, the moments of jubilation being the froth spraying off the tops of the waves, whose repeated breaking on the shores of our consciousness changes that collective consciousness. Hope needs to be set into motion along multiple vectors -- cultural and institutional -- and at multiple scales. But it requires political leadership, and leadership, in a system of politics as financially corrupted as this one, only comes with repeated kicks from behind. Friendly, soft, but persistent kicks.

Thanks to Ron Burnett for sharing the Vimeo link. Of the bloggers I've read commenting on the Supreme Court decision, Sara Robinson's at Campaign for America's Future, Chris Vitale's at Orbis Mediologicus, and Brendan Demelle's at Ecological Buddhism provide inspiring and interesting perspectives. And see Rebecca Solnit's piece on the disaster of media coverage of Haiti.

Incidentally, Bérubé's latest book The Left at War is well worth reading and discussing, even if one doesn't agree with all of it. And, incidentally, the title of this post, which refers to a Surrealist method of collective anti-authorship, isn't intended as a comment on Bérubé's piece but rather about what he is describing. Politics as a stumbling around in the dark, a piecing-together from the bits left by the last guy, with no idea what will come of it. At least Codrescu has the good sense to smell it and marvel at its texture.

Just a quick follow-up to the previous post...

After the East Anglia flare-up, Paul Krugman was right to ask what fuels the rage behind climate denialism. Anyone who has perused any popular web site on environmental and climate issues will be struck both by the numbers and the utter vehemence of the denialist community. Looking at their own web sites is even more disconcerting (I won't draw your attention to them; they're easy enough to find).

One of the things that fuels this is, of course, that it's well funded by the fossil fuel lobby (we've known that for years). Another is simply the organic totality of the American right, the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, for whom climate change has become a hinge issue, just as abortion and gay marriage have been for some years now. Krugman puts it down to anti-intellectualism and "mommy party" politics -- "Real men punish evildoers; they don’t adjust their lifestyles to protect the planet" -- which sounds a little like George Lakoff's argument about red staters' "strict father" politics versus blue staters' "nurturant mother" (which he later changed to "nurturant parent") politics, an oversimplification that captures something, but misses more.

Identity, however, is clearly an important piece of it (as the Identity Campaigning blog knows), which is why global ecopolitics is now at least as much a matter of communication, image production, and cultural activism as it is of science or policy formulation.