Simondon on Ontogenesis

Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) was a French philosopher best known for his theory of "individuation" and his influence on thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler.

"Simondon developed a theory of individual and collective individuation in which the individual subject is considered as an effect of individuation, rather than as a cause. Thus the individual atom is replaced by the neverending process of individuation. Simondon also conceived of "pre-individual fields" as the funds making individuation itself possible. Individuation is an always incomplete process, always leaving a "pre-individual" left-over, itself making possible future individuations. Furthermore, individuation always creates both an individual and a collective subject, which individuate themselves together." [source]

I have been putting off reading Simondon because he seems like one of those authors who had already articulated ideas that have been percolating in my brain for some time now. I always try as much as possible to avoid being 'contaminated' by the formulations of others before I work out my own thoughts on particular philosophical issues. However as Simondon's work continues to be translated, and as I keep encountering his ideas in various settings, I think its time for me to begin swimming upstream in that river.

I begin with this essay by Simondon in which he attempts to lay the conceptual groundwork for a wider understanding of how individuals come to be in the world:

The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis
By Gilbert Simondon

The reality of being as an individual may be approached in two ways: either via a substantialist path whereby being is considered as consistent in its unity, given to itself, founded upon itself, not created, resistant to that which it is not; or via a hylomorphic path, whereby the individual is considered to be created by the coming together of form and matter. The self-centered monism of substantialism is opposed to the bipolarity of the hylomorphic schema.

However, there is something that these two approaches to the reality of the individual have in common: both presuppose the existence of a principle of individuation that is anterior to the individuation itself, one that may be used to explain, produce, and conduct this individuation. Starting from the constituted and given individual, an attempt is made to step back to the conditions of its existence. This manner of posing the problem of individuation--starting from the observation of the existence of individuals--conceals a presupposition that must be examined, because it entails an important aspect for the proposed solutions and slips into the search for the principle of individuation. It is the individual, as a constituted individual, that is the interesting reality, the reality that must be explained.

The principle of individuation will be sought as a principle capable of explaining the characteristics of the individual, without a necessary relation to other aspects of being that could be correlatives of the appearance of an individuated reality. Such a research perspective gives an ontological privilege to the constituted individual. It therefore runs the risk of not producing a true ontogenesis--that is, of not placing the individual into the system of reality in which the individuation occurs.

Read More (PDF) @ Parrhesia

From Fractal Ontology:

In his review [of Simondon's L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique], Deleuze stresses that Simondon articulates a rigorous distinction between individuality and singularity due to an examination of the principle of individuation. Simondon begins with the problem of inferring a principle of individuation because current schools of thought tend to view the individual as a given. This confers an ontological privilege to an already constructed individual. But Simondon sees this view as a backwards approach, or what he terms reverse ontogenesis. In fact, because Simondon believes that individuation is merely one stage in the becoming of a being and thus is not the totality of a being, individuality falsely attributes a unity and identity to a heterogeneous milieu of forces from which the pre-individual nature of a being enters into communication with another order of magnitude. Thus, instead of focusing on the individual in order to infer the principle of individuation, Simondon asserts from the beginning that his project is to understand the individual in terms of individuation, which can be considered now as ontogenesis itself. (Taylor Atkins)

Fractal Ontology also has a short list of key concepts here - along with a few translations and several post about Simondon's work.

I'll update with my own notes as my thoughts begin to congregate on this material.

Necessary Gear

... in solidarity with the Egyptian people ...

click to enlarge

This image is from a leaflet/primer Egyptian activists have been circulating among protesters to help coordinate and focus the revolt. The leaflet in question can be read (in part) at The Atlantic here:

Egyptian Activists' Action Plan: Translated

   [ h/t to Mediacology, Homage to Cario (and beyond) ]

A Conversation with Julian Assange

Let me be VERY clear: I don't know if Julian Assange is guilty of sexual assault or not, and have no attachments to the man. However i fully support the activities of WikiLeaks - and I encourage everyone to read the information they release and support the organization's work in any way available to you.

Below is both parts of a conversation between 60 Minute's Steve Kroft and Julian Assange, the controversial cofounder of WikiLeaks, about the impact and purpose behind the now infamous information publications:

(i apologize in advance for the terrible advertisements embedded in these videos)






see also:   WikiRebels: The Documentary

Latour on Compositionism, Critique and New Politics

Bruno Latour in fine form (from 2010):

An Attempt At A “Compositionist Manifesto”
By Bruno Latour

Excerpts:

Today, the avant-gardes have all but disappeared, the front line is as impossible to draw as the precise boundaries of terrorist networks, and the well arrayed labels “archaic,” “reactionary,” “progressive” seem to hover haphazardly like a cloud of mosquitoes. If there is one thing that has vanished, it is the idea of a flow of time moving inevitably and irreversibly forward that can be predicted by clear sighted thinkers. The spirit of the age, if there is such a Zeitgeist, is rather that everything that had been taken for granted in the modernist grand narrative of Progress is fully reversible and that it is impossible to trust in the clear-sightedness of anyone —especially academics. (p.2-3)

Even though the word “composition” is a bit too long and windy, what is nice is that it underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity… Above all, a composition can fail and thus retains what is most important in the notion of constructivism (a label which I could have used as well, had it not been already taken by art history). It thus draws attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed. What is to be composed may, at any point, be decomposed. (p.3)

With critique, you may debunk, reveal, unveil, but only as long as you establish, through this process of creative destruction, a privileged access to the world of reality behind the veils of appearances. Critique, in other words, has all the limits of utopia: it relies on the certainty of the world beyond this world. By contrast, for compositionism, there is no world of beyond. It is all about immanence.

The difference is not moot, because what can be critiqued cannot be composed. It is really a mundane question of having the right tools for the right job. With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together. It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammer of critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of appearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath? (p.4)

Read More @ Latour’s Website

How Snow Works - Tobias Kwan



How The Snow Works (2010), by Tobias Kwan



Understanding the Rise of China

Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: 'How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise?' Jacques examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will soon become:

TED Profile:

Martin Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. He is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy, and a visiting research fellow at the LSE’s Asia Research Centre. He is a columnist for the Guardian and the New Statesman.

His interest in East Asia began in 1993 with a holiday in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. After that, he found every reason or excuse he could find to spend time in the region, be it personal, for newspaper articles or television programs. In 1977, he became editor of Marxism Today, a post he held for fourteen years, transforming what was an obscure and dull journal into the most influential political publication in Britain, read and respected on the right and left alike.

In 1991, he closed Marxism Today and in 1994 became the deputy editor of the Independent newspaper, a post he held until 1996. In 1993 he co-founded the think-tank Demos.

The Relentless Cult of Novelty

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian Nobel Prize winning author and historian. From 1945 to 1953 he was imprisoned for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn's work continued the realistic tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and provided sharp but popular commentaries on the flaws of both Eastern and Western cultures.

The following is a paper prepared by Solzhenitsyn and read by his son Ignat on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn being awarding the medal of honor for literature by the National Arts Club in New York City in 1987:

The Relentless Cult of Novelty

By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

There is a long-accepted truth about art that “style is the man” (“le style est l'homme”). This means that every work of a skilled musician, artist or writer is shaped by an absolutely unique combination of personality traits, creative abilities and individual, as well as national, experience. And since such a combination can never be repeated, art (but I shall speak primarily of literature) possesses infinite variety across the ages and among different peoples. The divine plan is such that there is no limit to the appearance of ever new and dazzling creative talent, none of whom, however, negate in any way the works of their outstanding predecessors, even though they may be 500 or 2,000 years removed. The unending quest for what is new and fresh is never closed to us, but this does not deprive our grateful memory of all that came before.

No new work of art comes into existence (whether consciously or unconsciously) without an organic link to what was created earlier. But it is equally true that a healthy conservatism must be flexible both in terms of creation and perception, remaining equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without which no future can ever be born. At the same time the artist must not forget that creative freedom can be dangerous, for the fewer artistic limitations he imposes on his own work, the less chance he has for artistic success. The loss of a responsible organizing force weakens or even ruins the structure, the meaning and the ultimate value of a work of art.

Read More @  The Catholic Education Resource Center

Control, Consciousness and Nonconsciousness

From On The Human:

Control: Conscious and Otherwise

By Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland

An important notion in moral philosophy and many legal systems is that certain circumstances can mitigate an individual’s responsibility for a transgression. Generally speaking, such situations are considered extenuating in virtue of their exceptional influence on a person’s ability to act and make decisions in a normal manner. The essence of the case for diminished responsibility is that these special circumstances impede the ability of a normal person to exercise self-control.

In recent years, however, this notion of diminished responsibility has come to wider attention in a quite unexpected way. Some researchers, drawing on findings from social psychology, have argued that situational forces may play a much larger role in behavior than traditionally assumed. The situational forces in question are often entirely ordinary, mundane and seemingly trivial. Given that such influences are pervasive, the general issue raised concerns control in commonplace cases. According to a condensed version of this view – which we call the Frail Control hypothesis for convenience – even in unexceptional conditions, humans have little control over their behavior. If correct, this line of argument could have widespread and dramatic ramifications, notably for our practices of attributing moral and legal responsibility. (We note that although in certain rare cases control and responsibility come apart, in most cases of moral and legal responsibility attribution, control and responsibility are closely linked.)

While agreeing that moral philosophy and the law can benefit from a greater understanding of developments in psychology and neuroscience, we suggest that the Frail Control challenge is markedly weakened once a wider range of data is considered. In our assessment, the Frail Control hypothesis underestimates the vigor of normal goal-maintenance in the face of distractions, and neglects the role of nonconscious aspects of control as displayed, for instance, in the exercise of cognitive, motor and social skills. Furthermore, a large psychological literature has demonstrated that nonconscious, automatic processes are pervasive and anything but “dumb”. Instead, they are often remarkably sophisticated and flexible in performing functions such as goal pursuit that were once considered the sole province of conscious cognition.

On the basis of these and other data, we develop an account of control that we believe goes some way toward sharpening the meaning of control – including nonconscious control – in a way that accommodates the role of nonconscious processes in nearly everything we do. the general conclusion we will be arguing for is that nonconscious processes can support a robust form of control and, by extension, that consciousness is not a necessary condition for control. One notable feature of our account is a model of control in which neurobiological criteria, rather than intuitive or behavioral criteria alone, define the boundaries of control. A significant virtue of this account, in light of the pervasiveness of automatic processes in our cognitive lives, is that it is agnostic as to whether the underlying processes are conscious or nonconscious.

Read More @ National Humanities Center

Ambiguity, Science and Myth

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it,
doesn't go away.” - Philip K. Dyck

"The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence."

- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, 1948, p. 129

“A postmodern science should not separate matter and consciousness and therefore not separate facts, meaning, and value. Science would then be inseparable from a kind of intrinsic morality, and truth and virtue would not be kept apart as they currently are in science. This separation is part of the reason we are in our current desperate situation.”

- Davis Bohm, Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World, 1988

"A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance."

- Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, 1991, p. 15

Jeffrey Bell on The Limits of Human Knowledge

Jeffrey Bell is currently in the midst of posting some thoughts on his recent readings of the work Graham Priest. Bell’s posts are always economical and lucid, which makes me wonder why his blog Aberrant Monism (a title that tickles my brain) doesn’t get much more attention in the blogoverse? Regardless, you will be reading a lot more about Bell's work here over the next few months - and both posts linked below are certainly representative of his interests and clarity.

In the first post Bell tackles Priest’s notion of the ‘nondenumerable’ (here), while exploring the convergences between Priest's work and the thought of Deleuze & Guattari regarding contradictory insights and the limits of philosophical thinking.

Here is an excerpt:

On my reading of Deleuze’s Hume, or the Deleuzian Hume that accounts for the profound sense in which Deleuze was a Humean throughout his career, the impressions and ideas are not to be understood as a countable set but are rather a nondenumerable multiplicity that becomes, when actualized, the bifurcations of conceptual thought. In Priest’s terms, the multiplicity Hume thinks in his Treatise is a limit to thought itself and gives rise to contradictions when it is thought. For example, there is the well-known contradiction in Hume’s thought, and one Hume himself despaired of in the appendix to the Treatise, regarding the self. On the one hand the self is understood to be nothing but a bundle of impressions and yet, through much of the latter half of the Treatise and in his essays, the self is the assumed and unquestioned condition for many of his analyses of the passions, justice, politics, etc. If the multiplicity of impressions and ideas is understood as a nondenumerable condition inseparable from thought, then as this condition is thought it gives rise to the bifurcations and contradictions that attend conceptual identifications (or intellectual mitosis as this was discussed in an earlier post), as is evidenced in this case with Hume’s attempts to delimit the identity of the self – he too encountered the contradictory limit.

In the next post (here) Bell investigates the idea of the paradox of expressibility and concludes that it’s appearance is the result of an even deeper “ontological paradox” at the heart of things.

Here is a particularly juicy excerpt:

What I’m interested in is with the something that is going on, for I take there to be something ontological going on, a paradox at the heart of reality. In Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos and in my earlier book The Problem of Difference I argue much along these lines, adopting Deleuze as my ally for in Deleuze we find one who repeatedly affirms certain paradoxes. One merely need look through the table of contents to Logic of Sense to discover the importance of paradox in Deleuze’s thought – the first two chapters on becoming and surface effects are about the paradoxes of each, and these set the stage for the remaining discussions of the book. This is not to say that Deleuze and Priest are of the same mind. Priest sets out to incorporate the ‘true contradictions’ that arise at the limits of thought and expression into a broader and more encompassing logic, what he calls dialetheism; whereas Deleuze on my view is more interested in affirming the paradox at the ontological level, at the level of becoming and process rather than at the level of logic.

And in the comments replying to a sloppy question posed by yours truly Bell writes:

…if you push Humean empiricism to its transcendental limits, as I think Deleuze does for instance in his reading of Hume, and if you push Kantian rationalism to its transcendental limits, as Priest argues Hegel does, then in both cases you return to the ontological paradox that is the condition of possibility for the two branches, for this intellectual bifurcation.

Which I would push even further to argue that when acknowledged and affirmed the ‘ontological paradox’ jolts us back into a realization of the ontological intimacy (embeddedness) of things, and offers a cognitive being such as us an opportunity know just a little bit more than what the limits of conceptual knowledge can possibly hold.

David Roden on Assemblages and Emergence

Below is David Roden commenting on everything from micro-causality, macro-processes, and DeLanda and Kant to the crucial differences between properties and capacities. It's an interesting read from an interesting philosopher. Roden blogs at enemyindustry:

Flat Ontology II: A Worry About Emergence

by David Roden

Summary: if you want to distinguish assemblages from aggregates in a flat ontology you need a metaphysics of emergence. But real emergence may not work unless we deny that parts of assemblages are separate from the whole. This seems to undermine the point of assemblages where, it is said, the parts are logically exterior from one another can play elsewhere.

The idea of a flat ontology was taken over by Manuel Delanda from Gilles Deleuze. As Levi-Bryant notes in the Speculative Turn, it derives from the Deleuzean thesis of the univocity of being: viz that Being is always predicated of entities in the same sense (Bryant 2010, 269). A flat ontology is one in which no entity is ontologically more fundamental than anything else. Otherwise put, flat ontologies can be opposed to hierarchical ontologies:

[While] an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status (DeLanda 2004, p. 58).

In a flat ontology the powers and dispositions of an entity are explained with reference to interactions between the particulars that compose or otherwise relate to it. It is never the result of entities of one kind being pushed around by a privileged being like a god, a transcendental subject, a natural state or its associated species essences (Sober 1980).

However, the behaviour of complex entities like organisms, people or societies must be more than the sum of their micro-interactions of these are to be genuine presences in the world and not accountancy tools for tracking the aggregate behaviour of their components. The macro-level properties of complex beings must thus be emergent from and not merely resultants of these interactions. Unless a concept of emergence can explain how complexes derive their powers from their parts without being reducible to their aggregate behaviour, it is of little value to a flat ontology. Similarly, as Graham Harman emphasizes in his commentary on Delanda, a flat ontology recognizes no ontological primacy of natural over so-called artificial kinds. Both kinds of kind should be viewed as having equal ontological weight to throw around (Harman 2008, 372).

Read More @ Enemy Industry

Naomi Klein On Our Addiction To Risk

Days before the talk below, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

Defining quote from the talk (which i support wholebrainedly):

"The bottom line is that we badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes—and we need heroes willing to take different kinds of risks. Risks that confront recklessness head-on, and that put the precautionary principle into practice—even if that means direct action.

Like the hundreds of young people getting arrested blocking dirty power plants, or fighting mountain top removal coal mining. Like the indigenous people and ranchers in the US banding together to stop a new pipeline carrying tar sands oil. The organizers call it the “Cowboys and Indians coalition”—a new twist on an old myth.

Most of all we need stories that replace linear narratives of endless growth with circular ones that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it Karma if you like. Call it Physics: action and reaction.

Or call it precaution: the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit."

Dark Chemistry on Realism, Materialism and Speculation

Below is an outstanding new post from S.C. Hickman of the brilliant Dark Chemistry weblog. If you are at all interesting in Speculative Realism, philosophy or theory in general I suggest you go visit Dark Chemistry as soon as possible.

Alien Manifesto: The Interrogation of the Real - Speculations on Realism and Materialism

By S.C. Hickman

"What we witness in this time is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World turning into Rave New World. A world in which the well known and the so called lines between mind and body, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, organic and inorganic, life and death, are not just blurred, but have completely disappeared. And yet, at the same time, these lines are in the process of reappearance." -Cengiz Erdem

In a time when all boundaries between the real and unreal begin to fade, mutate, wander or waver and blur under the pressure of thought's duplicitous force, when the rendering of the human turns unhuman, - and we begin to see beyond all thought of the human a dark horizon glimmering on the edge of the great frontier of Being, portending a return of that which for so long has lain hidden in the excluded, reviled, tormented Umwelt of the absolute real - we once again renew the struggle within the life/death drives stirring within and without us, moving beyond the threshold of our own surrounding world, discovering in those monstrous entities emerging from their thick lairs inside and outside: a strangeness, a fecundity of incommensurable forces surging through all things, preying upon the very fabric of the real like bottom feeders from some hyperdimensional realm of chaos. These alien parasites seek in the bright jewel of our universe a consummation to their nihilistic life, burrowing into and permeating our dark chemistry, entering into our fleshly existence through genetic mutations exterior to all relation except that of objects connected and connecting only in the moment of relation, co-evolving with us in a terrible enthronement of that principle of mastery that resolves itself as sheer nihil.

In the face of such monstrous pressures from within and without we struggle to free ourselves, turning the very weapons of thought against these dark intrusions, reforging the links to a speculative philosophy that might help us emerge from our zombied existence, and once again walk in the gardens of Being - if not like gods, then like alien ambassadors of a new order of the real who have seen for the first time the truth of our alienness. For being alien is not what you think it is, it is not an invasion from without by those forces that seek to take from us the very subsistence of our hard work, our labour; no, instead the alien is the immanent pressure within us all to regain that affective paradise of the real against which all thought flees: the monstrous truth at the core of our own nothingness - that we have already-always been alien; it is the very life of being as Being.

"I am happy that it is not merely a continuation of classical metaphysics nor an end of it. In this sense I am in agreement with the word realism. We are beyond the end of metaphysics and classical metaphysics with the term realism. The question of realism as opposed to materialism is not a crucial question today. What is important is that it is not correlationist or idealist. It is a new space for philosophy, one with many internal differences but this is a positive symptom." - Alain Badiou

"The problem is not ‘can we penetrate through the veil of subjectively-constituted phenomena to things-in themselves’, but ‘how do phenomena themselves arise within the flat stupidity of reality which just is, how does reality redouble itself and start to appear to itself’. For this, we need a theory of subject which is neither that of transcendental subjectivity nor that of reducing the subject to a part of objective reality. This theory is, as far as I can see, still lacking in speculative realism." - Slavoj Zizek

But which speculative path to follow? Do we go the way of the realists or the materialists in our speculative philosophy, both of whom find in speculation a profound remedy against all correlationist, for whom anti-realism of the post-Kantian self-world axis qualifies as a sovereign humanism; or, shall we discover an alternate path: one more attuned to the deliberations of a thought free of both deliriums? Or, is this, too, a vanity?

Read More @ Dark Chemistry

Love & Power

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

— Martin Luther King Jr, Where Do We Go from Here?

30 Giant Hornets vs. 30,000 European Honey Bees

Upon watching I just had to post this: 30 Japanese Giant Hornets kill 30,000 Honey Bees. A massive attack by massive hornets (which I never heard of until today):

Violent and astonishing.

From Wikipedia:

The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia), including the subspecies Japanese giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia japonica), colloquially known as the yak-killer hornet, is the world's largest hornet, native to temperate and tropical Eastern Asia. Its body length is approximately 50 mm (2 in), with a wingspan of about 76 mm (3 in). The Japanese name for this insect is suzume bachi, literally "sparrow hornet".

Jack Crow on Institutional Reality

The eclectic machines and artifacts we gather around us are ephemeral units - simultaneous supplements and extensions - that feed back and affect us; but no where do they exist without us.

Jack Crow on the human foundations of institutional realities:

The State does not exist. Approximately two and half million people work as civilian employees of the federal government. And another approximately two million persons in uniform.

The corporation does not exist. Approximately one hundred fifty million Americans work for an incorporated, limited liability or other business concern. If asked to show the corporation (or a State), you will find no thing which you can demonstrate. You can show people acting, working, ordering, obeying. You can show the material assets they have made, or collected. You can show the physical locations which they have isolated as "their own," and how those who give the orders enforce that control of space. But the so-called thing - the corporation - does not exist. The corporation, as such, functions only as a faith premise. As a belief that certain conduct, done together or under orders, amounts to a real object with an independent existence.

The gap between the fiction (state, corporation) and the material reality of laboring at the command or behest of another person or persons exists only in the human brain.

More exactly, the fictions for which people labor exist only in human brains. The so-called organizations for which they work do not in fact exist. There is no observable or demonstrable spiritual or etheric connective tissue which exists in between persons, uniting them as members of an institution or organization.

The organization itself exists only as a function of memory. As a false memory, in so much as the organization has no material reality. The organization, as learned behavior.

In discussing so-called institutions and organizations, we speak not of objective entities, of things. What we treat as things, instead exist only as remembered agreements to believe, and to believe wrongly: that a segment of a population exists as an isolated, self-contained, self-repeating entity; that routines of conduct map entities to which we belong; that habits of obedience and compulsion describe the operations of a suprapersonal creation which has its own life or existence; that coordination of tasks and labor engenders a thing which operates at a remove from the material conduct of persons or people.

The organization possesses no more self-evident truth than does any other claim to the existence of an entity which cannot demonstrate itself, but acquires shape in the brain only as a declaration of faith - God, personified fate, ghosts, consciousness, the spirit, souls or the Tao…

Read more @ The Crows Eye

Thinking The Middle Ground

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[ please note: if you prefer to read this post on a white background with black text please follow this: link ]

JOSEPH C. GOODSON: it is [the] idea of an organism, a totality, which basically crushes its parts into submission, that feeds and drains them into the fluid "whole," this ontology itself is woefully under-analyzed and too easily granted. Aristotle's response is as forceful now as it was to the pre-Sophists: if everything is a reflection, if everything is attributable to everything else, then nothing can ever change. At its root, every philosophy which does not admit of some kind of essential substance, form or unity is ultimately left scratching their head about causality, or dissolving it outright into a Heraclitean plasma. I can hear the rejoinder now: "but we want to think the middle ground between this disastrous, changeless flow and a world of specific, disengaged pieces of concrete that never meet at all." Well, then welcome to object-oriented philosophy, the only game in town at the moment which ventures to think the unified multiplicity that is the thing, or this thing, or any-thing at all. Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?

MICHAEL: Who among the relationists has ever argued for a 'crushed totality'? Let's not continue to build strawmen here. Admitting organicity in the world is not necessarily implying “organism” as characterized by those who seek to deny totality. And, besides, the question of monism is not settled, so why should we act as if it is? Being dazzled by multiplicity is not a confirmation that reality is inherently torn asunder. The case has not yet been adequately made on that account in the view of many.

Thinking the middle ground is precisely what needs to be done. But there are many ways to do it. Some may find that language that reifies temporal individuality suits their fancy, while others may chose a more open-ended vocabulary to describe the coming into being and relative persistence of complexity.

My suggestion remains that whatever signaling system we want to use we better damn well make sure we continually reference actually existing entities, lest we dogmatically confuse our pet theories (maps) for what is real and efficacious (territory).

Something you wrote that I certainly do agree with was this:

“Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?”

Brilliant! But again, there are many different ways to get that done, and Shaviro, Ivakhiv and Vitale all have seemingly adequate ways of addressing for that requirement that, I feel, continue to be overlooked or unfairly characterized.

JOSEPH: I don't think that relationism is stupid or nonsensical -- it isn't. There is a significant dimension of life that is relational, so there's no question that relationism is responding to something that is real. It most surely is. And I appreciate its radical overstatement in its ontological principles. There is something absolutely admirable in the courage of these thinkers (Vitale, Ivakhiv and Shaviro, along with Whitehead, Latour and Heidegger) who push their insights as far as they will go, and then see what the universe looks like.

MICHAEL: I can’t help but sense a bit of condescension here Joseph. By many accounts relationality has been drastically understated in intellectual history, and certainly among people generally. If anything, it is the case for objects, units, commodities, stand-alone complexes, and individuals that has been drastically overstated in the wider culture. Isolation, atomism and its bastard child anomie have all wreaked havoc in the hearts and minds of past generations – even becoming entrenched in so many of those institutions which seek to separate us and explain away deep relationships and the intrinsically embedded and hybrid nature of life. But it is the universe itself – as a diverse fabric of possibility and differentiation – that continues to demand we take process and contingency seriously.

JOSEPH: The problem, though, articulated in object-oriented ontology, is that they only pay attention to half of reality. So when blown up, that model of being is drastically top-heavy, because it is almost literally missing half of the world. Everything becomes diacritical, dependent in some way in its very essence on, or to, its relation to something else, and then that something is itself another relation on or to something else, and so on and so on. By this time, you can't encounter a unified entity at all -- you can only encounter a series of prior relations, perceptions or prehensions, all present in some degree or another (because, quite simply, there is nothing else to be but the result of a relation). But how could any such aggregate of nothing but relations possibly work? Where is its point of affect, of difference, of identity? Everything is drained of its specific power and deferred along an endless network with nothing really created or destroyed at all, since the sum total amount of energy of the network, its relational power, is always the same, neither more or less.

MICHAEL: Perhaps in some versions of extreme (or pop) relationalism this is an issue, sure. And I appreciate what you want to guard against here Joseph, I really do. In my own developing conceptual tool-kit I have a term for that ‘aspect’ of an object or whole (or as I prefer, assemblage) that is irreducibly an individual: onto-specificity. That is, objects/assemblages have an onto-specificity, efficacy or uniqueness that is irreducible, or ‘withdrawn’ into its own assembled immanent properties. However, and herein lies the crux, every actually existing object and assemblage is also entangled in a web of relations and contexts that occasion them – and which ensure a particular degree of vulnerability to processes, forces, affects and potencies not embodied in the very properties that constitute them. In other words, each object is generated out of the same background reality as every other thing in a way that allows them to inter and intra act upon each other, and ultimately – through various natural processes – allows new assemblages and relational complexes to emerge (or be generated). Thus, the only way that “unified entities” can occur at all is in deep relation to other differentiated occurrences operating on the same processual plane.

But all this should not be sloppily dismissed or mistaken for “goo” metaphysics, because of my aforementioned ‘principle of onto-specificity’ – which reminds us that each occurrence, object, event or assemblage has its own unique structural (and material?) withdrawedness and affective potency expressed via its intrinsic properties. And the fact that such properties remain relational and vulnerable to affective forces and processes (that is to say, all objects are impermanent and temporal) does not negate any particular entity’s ‘historical’ capacity to be what it specifically is.

So you ask, ‘where is the force of things? Well, in the specific properties (“character”?) of the things-themselves as they are temporarily assembled and exist in relative (and relational) difference to other coalescences. Individuality, in this view, is simply the onto-specific result of the asymmetrical diffusion of existing cosmic properties coalescing according to the contingent relations of differential processes.

JOSEPH: Implicitly, somewhere, relations must be treated the way object-oriented thought treats objects -- that a relation has a specific power and a specific set of qualities such that it is able to something that nothing else can do, something which gives rise to this particular entity.

MICHAEL: Agreed. But remember, relations are not “things” at all (at least not to me). Relations happen between things, among things, and on every scale – but only because all things exist on the same plane of reality (hence flat ontologies), and are therefore accessible to each other, and are parts of the differential distribution of intensive and extensive properties.

JOSEPH: One wants relations, somewhere, to be discrete and relatively isolated from one another, so that one may account for the differences that do appear in the universe. A relation is treated as if it isn't, by degrees, a sheer reflection of everything it encounters. My encounter with my desk is not the same as my encounter with the floor, or the ceiling or this computer -- but why? You have to start distinguishing relations to explain that, to say that this set of relations is absolutely different from that set. But once you start that, then you have to begin to see that these distinct sets are built of more distinctions -- the world begins to disintegrate, not reflect.

MICHAEL: But, I suggest, only in abstraction. Once we start talking about actual immanent properties and materialities, and the differences that obtain between particular coalescences and their simultaneous contingent relationships, we begin to be able to trace particular entities in all their efficacious glory and rich character. If we grant that relations are not ‘things’ but that which happens among the processual activities of existing properties and occurrences, then the details or actualities of particular (onto-specific) worldly entities (or as Adrian says, “achievements”) are what is most relevant. Only when things are encountered for what they in fact are, and understood in the context of how it is that they are maintained and have come to be, do we approach anything like an authentic (primate) ontographic praxis.

JOSEPH: When Whitehead says that you always have a perception between the subject and the object, each being relative to the other's relation (one is both the subject and the object, both perceived and perceiver), how does that really work? What are you really perceiving but yet another act of subject-object perception, and another, and another...? How is one perception different from another if the perceiver is completely exhausted and poured into the perception itself? Once you posit some kind of alterity to perception, something that isn't of this perception, that is, that a perception of this object is unique because it is my perception and not the things that perceive me, or that have perceived me, or that will perceive me, and that the same is true for the object in front of me, that I'm not encountering everything that perceived it in the past, because most of those things had no effect on it at all, and that I am not encountering a shifting sum of those encounters, but some kind of tentative unit -- well, all of this seems inevitable. This is why Ivakhiv has to have recourse to Whitehead's notion of society, because things do not change with every relation or perception, nor are they are kind of running total of all those perceptions. I think he's halfway there. The next best step is to say that there are only societies, though of varying scale and duration.

MICHAEL: I honestly don’t know enough Whitehead to say too much about what his system can or cannot explain Joseph, so I won’t. All I can suggest in this regard is that I don’t read Adrian as adhering to a strict Whiteheadian ontology, but only see him using bits and pieces here and there while building his own conceptual apparatus – so I think you’d have to put that issue to him. I think Adrian goes much further than you suggest in his appreciation of the efficacy of things, but that’s just my reading.

As for Whitehead’s “societies”, well, I personally don’t draw a distinction between objects and assemblages, and relations for that matter; I think they all occasion each other in ecologies upon ecologies, all the way down, as they say. And, as you said, “every object is an ecology, but also an ecology”.

Location Location

Look who has gone and done grown up: the new web address for this awkward carnival ride is:

www.archivefire.net/

It's true. Please change your links and feeds accordingly.

No Islands In Tucson

John Protevi has posted a fantastic analysis of some of the rhetoric and debate over the “causes” of the recent shootings and assassination attempt in Tucson, Arizona (here). Protevi persuasively contests many of the linear, mechanistic notions of causality currently at play, and shows how human behavior is infinitely more complex that most pundits seem willing to accept. Protevi now has additional posts extending his analysis and in discussion with some critics: here and here.

Richard Grusin of the Premediation blog has also followed-up with a brilliant post of his own  making use of Protevi’s analysis and human affect dynamics - with a Heideggerian twist (here). As Grusin argues,

Seen from the perspective of mood or structure of feeling, the relation between Jared Loughner's actions and the violent, anti-government rhetoric of politicians and media figures on the right becomes more clear. Repeated assertions of the appropriateness of using violence against elected government officials when one is unable to use democratic measures to get one's way produce a structure of feeling and an anti-government violent mood within which individual and collective political action and affectivity unfold. We do not directly have to read or hear any particular call for anti-government violence for it to influence our actions. The totality of such violent rhetorical expressions, repeated ad nauseum in print, televisual, and networked media, provides the atmosphere or environment within which our relation to the government takes shape.

I recommend you go read both posts right now.

My own perspective is that the Tucon murders are a symptom of a much more extensive assemblage of pathologies within our social matrix. Rhetoric, psychological capacities, cultural processes, institutions – they all factor in. And many of our most dominant and hegemonic systems and practices are indeed so disconnected to any sense of what is most healthy for humans or other sentient and non-sentient beings that they no longer serve any reasonable purpose.

Below are some remarks I made over at Jack Crow’s The Crow’s Eye blog a few days ago (before Protevi and Grusin weighed-in):

"Incitements" and human natures co-exist: each playing off each other, in feedback loops of actualization. To excuse Palin's (implicit) call to violence, or to ignore the very real affect it had on the killer is to miss the complexity inherent to the situation Jack. …humans are not islands to themselves; we exist enmeshed in webs of significance and generate our behaviors from the confluence of social and personal realities.

Palin’s "targeting" of Gabrielle seemed to have deeply influenced Loughner. That cannot be explained away, no matter how much we want to appeal to “individualism” as the master trope of responsibility…

The poster (and website) did not "cause" Loughner to shoot - it added ideological and psychological force to his desire to shoot. "influence" is not either/or, but AND. It is the combination of factors (including his biopsychological makeup and personal history) that led him to kill… You combine Loughner, X, Y and Z - and a Palin call to target, "take out" or otherwise eliminate politicians - and the tipping point results in murder.

Again, causality is never a simply issue, especially when considering subconscious and conscious dynamics, but there are mountains of empirical evidence to demonstrate that "ideology" (and implicit signals) DO impact people's consciousness, especially unstable people, and catalyze behavior.

Palin didn't "cause" him to shoot, but her ideology and implicit signals DOES have an impact on those who look to her as their leader. …humans are not islands; we are vulnerable to myriad of influences. Rhetoric NEVER “directly causes” people to do horrid things, but it does influence.

Maybe it's the whole culture of insanity (systemic killing, random killing, bank-dominating, etc, etc, etc,.) that we are swimming in, that is beginning to reach a tipping point?

 This was a terrible event. And I don’t feel like adding too much to what I said above, or what has already outlined by Protevi and Grusin, because I think the whole network of results speak for themselves. It’s a sad politico-cultural state we hyper-moderns now live in.

No Greater Responsibility for Intellectuals

"Relentless criticism can delegitimize the system and release people into struggle."

From Adbusters:

No Greater Responsibility for Intellectuals

by Joel Kovel | 28 Dec 2010

Beaten down by the great defeats of utopian and social ideals, few today even bother to think about the kinds of society that could replace the present one, and most of that speculation is within a green paradigm limited by an insufficient appreciation of the regime of capital and of the depths needed for real change. Instead, Greens tend to imagine an orderly extension of community accompanied by the use of instruments that have been specifically created to keep the present system going, such as parliamentary elections and various tax policies. Such measures make transformative sense, however, only if seen as prefigurations of something more radical – something by definition not immediately on the horizon.

The first two steps on that path are clearly laid out and are within the reach of every conscientious person. These are that people ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system “from top to bottom,” and that they include in this a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it. If one believes that capital is not only basically unjust but radically unsustainable as well, the prime obligation is to spread news.

The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous – and no wonder, given how wonderfully convenient the idea is to the ruling ideology. That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense and a failure of vision and political will. Nothing lasts forever and what is humanly made can theoretically be unmade. Of course it could be the case that the job of changing it is too hard and capital is as far as humanity can go, in which instance we must simply accept our fate stoically and try to palliate the results. But we don’t know this and cannot know this. There is no proving it one way or the other and only inertia, fear of change or opportunism can explain the belief in so shabby an idea as that there can be no alternative to capital for organizing society.

At some point the realization will dawn that all the sound ideas for, say, regulating the chemical industries or preserving forest ecosystems or doing something serious about species-extinctions or global warming or whatever point of ecosystem disintegration is of concern are not going to be realized by appealing to local changes in themselves or to the Democratic Party, to the Environmental Protection Agency, to the courts, to the foundations, to ecophilosophies or to changes in consciousness. For the overriding reason is that we are living under a regime that controls both the state and the economy and that regime will have to be overcome at its root if we are to save the future.

Relentless criticism can delegitimize the system and release people into struggle. And as struggle develops, victories that are no more than incremental on their own terms – stopping a meeting of the IMF, stirring hopes with a campaign such as Ralph Nader’s in 2000 – can have a symbolic effect far greater than their external result and can constitute points of rupture with capital. This rupture is not a set of facts added to our knowledge of the world but a change in our relation to the world. Its effects are dynamic, not incremental, and like all genuine insights it changes the balance of forces and can propagate very swiftly. Thus the release from inertia can trigger a rapid cascade of changes, so that it could be said that the forces pressing toward radical change need not be linear and incremental, but can be exponential. In this way, conscientious and radical criticism of the given, even in advance of blueprints for an alternative, can be a material force because it can seize the mind of the masses of the people. There is no greater responsibility for intellectuals.

Excerpt from Joel Kovel’s Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Joel Kovel is the editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism, a journal of ecosocialism.

[ h/t Bill Harryman]

Speculative Parody

From Robert Jackson:

Speculative Realism Blog Generator

Just saw this funny spoof on Speculative Realism posts – not sure who has done it – or how old it is.

“What is really real is that the unchanging substance of which all good blog names are made is a gothy adjective and a philosophical noun. Here, finally, is a website that creates blog names so great, you don’t have to go to the trouble of making the actual blog.”

We all love a good mockery, they make the mocked thing more real in most cases. Heres some of my favourites; Withdrawn Conception; Putrescent Conception; Hostile Erosion; Hostile Generation (a good unexpected pun); Dwindling Ruin; and finally my very favourite Aesthetic Realism of course. There aren’t many words in both databases, so more work is needed there. Plenty of scope in the Speculative Realist lexicon.

Funny and awesome all bundled up into one (dare I say) object! Cool. My favorites include Vital Ruin and Dwindling Canker. And I'm definately going to use several of the pictures displayed on the site!

On Cosmic Contingency

"Earthly thought embraces perishability (i.e. cosmic contingency) as its immanent core …. such perishability … grasps the openness of Earth towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic / necrocratic correlations (as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and loosening into the cosmic abyss … The only true terrestrial ecology is the one founded on the unilateral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is no chance of resistance – there are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity ... Hence, the Cartesian dilemma, 'What course in life shall I follow?' should be bastardized as 'Which way out shall I take?'"

- Reza Negarestani, Solar Infernal and the earthbound Abyss  [ via Scott Wilson ]

Meillassoux, Ancestrality and Flesh

A gorgeous statement from Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude (p.48) - which I mostly agree with:

"…we must understand that what distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished (in the strong sense) by the straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement. The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing, i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic. ... The arche-fossil enjoins us to track thought by inviting us to discover the 'hidden passage' trodden by the latter in order to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not".

One caveat: the “grasping” is ultimately not going to happen within “thought”, but through the collapse of thinking upon the foundations set by our visceral intimacy with the world. “Thought” is not the royal road - but a refraction of what comes before it. The way out of the ‘correlationist’ dilemma, then, is attenuation to that which is prior to the correlation itself; namely, the Flesh.

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Part I, Chapter 4, "On the despisers of the body"(1885).  

The Sympathetic Species

Popular science author Robert Wright and University of California-Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner (author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life) discuss human nature and our capacity for sympathy and compassion over at Bloggingheads.Tv:

Learn more: here. [h/t Bill Harryman]

also check out:

• Bonobos, Culture and Human Uniqueness
• Sapolsky on the Uniqueness of Human Beings

Daniel Dennett on Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Consciousness

Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. His 2003 book Freedom Evolves explores the way our brains have evolved to give us -- and only us -- the kind of freedom that matters.

Below is the abstract and link to a paper Dennett wrote about the relationship between philosophy and cognitive science. The conclusions he comes to may not be as easy to dismiss as you may think. Check it out:

The Part of Cognitive Science That Is Philosophy

By Daniel C. Dennett

There is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitive science if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science, work toward testable hypotheses, and take on the task of clarifying the relationship between the scientific concepts and the everyday concepts with which we conduct our moral lives.

Read More @ Tufts University

In the 22min video below Dennett picks up on the theme of philosophy relating to cognitive science, and makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us: