You can now listen to audio of the recent conference in Zagreb on 'neo-vitalism' and 'anti-vitalism' entitled "to have done with life" here: June 17-19, 2011.
I’ll summarize: “we’re all really smart and if we can’t construct a coherent metaphysics of difference with regards to the properties of a crow-bar and a crow, then you can’t either. ” Biotech, biopolitics and the will to speculation converge into a frenzy of post-Heidegger, post-heuristic cyborg fantasy.
And what is with the world’s top
To be fair, there was some good stuff about “Life” being the contemporary equivalent of a previous preoccupation with “Being”. Evan Caulder Williams’ work is always fascinating and politically poignant, and Adrian Johnson’s talk was also characteristically lucid and great for thinking about “second natures” as continuous extensions of complex matter.
[ h/t immanence ]
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14 comments:
ha, now you know why I said that yer blogging is well beyond most grad student (or most academics period) level work, they sadly all too often have just learned certain cut&paste methods of reading and writing and like many technicians trained to manuals falter in the face of the new/yet-unknown/emerging/complex. I have just listened to the Malabou (thanks for sharng this link) so far and while as someone who was on the Rorty side of the Rorty/Derrida debates back in the day I'm gratified that many of the Derrida people are now coming to a more pragmatist position her work on the brain is pretty weak sauce and like Levi and others she is overly enthusiastic about plasticity, which is a wonder in terms of say rehab tx, but really quite limited. Our bodies are pretty conservative all things considered and barring major damage/disruption change is very hard/limited. This is why I'm fascinated by those shifts/conversions that do occur and can see why people talk about them in terms of grace, or spells/possession, as they feel like they come from out-side of our selves. Here Stengers rejection, pace Freud and others, of Objectivity and embrace of interest/mesmerism seems important in terms of rethinking the vital role of rhetoric.
http://mq.academia.edu/JohnSutton/Papers/304365/Exograms_and_interdisciplinarity_history_the_extended_mind_and_the_civilizing_process
I was thinking the same thing, concerning some of questions but also some of the papers presented. It is one thing to critique the historical way nature has been though (fundamentally in an onto-theological way), but it is another to claim a post-natural way of thinking nature that is vague, or misguided, at best. And also: does anyone in the SR/OOO world take seriously Brassier's sort of naturalism? - Leon / AFTER NATURE
@Dirk - i guess it just it frustrates me that these powerful minds are willingly engaging in jingoistic debates of superfluous conceptuality. I mean if the person giving the paper can’t understand what someone is asking them it probably means you’re talking out your ass. And often with these things there are only a few hundred people on this planet who are even capable of understanding the full context in which such intellectual expressions are being performed. It’s maddening.
One major exception, I find, among that group is Even Calder Williams. His discourse is always politically relevant, and he’s great at pointing out certain practical/ideological inconsistencies. I like what he is up to.
I don’t have a true opinion on Malabou yet. I like her topics and find her use of Derrida fascinating, but I haven’t read her enough to say anything intelligent about her positions.
I’m interested in your take on ‘plasticity’ though. I really like the concept, broadly applied, and think we can do some great work on that front with regards to designing new concepts (metaphysics?) for understanding change, hybridity and complex assemblages. In fact, coupled with a critical understanding of ‘resiliency’, thinking about the malleability of things can continue to open new vistas for political and ecological praxis. That is, ‘plasticity’ and ‘resiliency’ might be key concepts in frameworks and practices which anchor a wider appreciation for adaptation and dynamicism as fundamental features of social life.
More concretely, as you imply, there are basic applications of plasticity in the medical sciences that can be diffused into public health practices/policy towards reorganizing certain institutions and municipal spending. What if, for example, public schools incorporated a neuro-sensitive approach in designing curriculum, teaching technologies, and classroom design? Or if public transportation was viewed as more systems of education nexuses or community-building (socialization) spaces – as brain enriching opportunities – rather than passive carriers of bodies deemed available to marketing campaigns?
That said, your caution about the “conservative” nature of bodies is a good one. We shouldn’t push the notion of plasticity past what is empirically appropriate.
Rhetoric, for me, is a full-bodied affair – partaking and evoking the symbolic, imaginal and material aspects of encountered agency. When two (or more) bodies collide they mingle in ways that are specific to their emanating properties; properties which include linguistic and material expressivity. In this sense, dance and sexual foreplay are as much rhetoric as predator drones and terrorist activities.
All things being equal (immanent), the dynamics between assemblages must be tracked and understood ‘on a case by case basis’ – with all the onto-specific idiosyncrasies that obtain.
@Leon – I share your skepticism here. I honestly can’t find value on the kinds of post-post-post meta language games certain philosophers play. I agree with Adrian Ivakhiv that there seems to be a certain avant-gardeism at play here. It’s as if people are competing to see who can come up with the most original deviation without regard to the ‘violence’ that might do to basic intelligibility. I mean who really wants to completely erase the distinction between Life (sentience?) and non-Life (non-sentience)?
RE: onto-theology, I have never been able view metaphysics other than onto-theology. All metaphysics is onto-theology, or at least what Kant called “transcendental theology”; reason-based (speculative) ontology. Heidegger agued something similar in his essay "The End of Metaphysics", as well as in "Identity and Difference."
IMO, if we are going to make pronouncements about the fundamental structure of reality then we are necessarily leaping into a certain conceptual ‘faith’.
As for Brassier, I’m a bit grumpy at him right now – what with his comments about theory blogging – but I have to say that I found Alien Theory incredibly fascinating. I can’t say that I follow all his lines of thought therein, but it was incredibly stimulating.
I wonder, what is your take on his naturalism? You’d be better suited to judge than I Leon, so where does he go wrong?
just a quick note to say Yes, the only addition I would make is that beyond "tracking" and "understanding" we should be inventing/experimenting. not unlike say how potters have worked out their notebooks for different firings/glazes. for me this is why I keep recommending a kind of turn to folks like Rabinow. Malabou is heading in the right direction but she ignores all of the good neuro-phenomenlogy happening out there.
sadly we still know next to nothing about how brains work but if brain-science had been what it is now back the 80's I would have likely stuck with it instead of shifting to philosophy, the future for such matters, along the lines that you lay out here, is quite bright. My only caveat would be that, as Donald Schon taught us, that we still need to learn to learn from reflecting on our practices.
on the topic of feeling your pain My wife has forbidden me to attend anymore academic conferences/lectures b/c I always come back so angry that there is so little thinking things through/comprehension going on.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h3xfh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Sch%C3%B6n
http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/index.html
Research and Destroy
I'm more of a fan of Wittgensteinian style therapy than Johnston but his talk was interesting until he go to the part where Hegel was The Answer, more McDowell is on my reading list and this was a good prod, I don't know Nancy Cartwright would anyone here recommend that I read her and if so what?
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1043
http://www.podcast.tv/video-episodes/reasoning-with-hypocrisy-robert-kurzban-on-the-modular-mind-13847448.html
I think we need a serious revival of Occam's Razor. Fuzzy, pointlessly multivalent language can create fuzzy, multivalent thinking - which can be seriously counter-productive when dealing with things that are pretty simple at the end of the day. That Darwin quote in the previous post is a great example of presenting radical ideas. There's ideas that change the world, and then there's just pointless, endless footnotes and sub-clauses squeezing out the ideas.
@Dirk - "beyond "tracking" and "understanding" we should be inventing/experimenting."
Agreed. Praxis is paramount. We need a hyper-creative community to up our capacity for resilience. For me, it all falls under the umbrella of infrastructure.
The question of 'what needs to be done to cultivate worldspaces of flourshing?' is at once a technical, ethical, existential and ecological question.
@W - well said. As a species/civilization we are in such deep crisis that the kind of 'high' cultural discussions and intellectual activity generated by ‘those’ types of questions/discourses/conferences seem to me like monstrous misallocations of needed cognitive and material resources.
How many angels was that dancing on the head of a pin again..?
http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/07/deleuze-and-life-essay-draft-uploaded.html
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