First Nations Rising?

"When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is, for the people and for each segment of the population, the most sacred of rights and the most fundamental of duties." 

- Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 24 June 1793

Hundreds of First Nations people gathered yesterday for Idle No More, a national day of protest against the Canadian federal government's Bill C-45 (the so-called "Jobs and Growth Act") which intentionally attempts to supersede and violate long-standing treaty rights in oder to promote 'ecnomic growth' and private business interests.

The omnibus legislation contains changes to the Indian Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act impacting all areas of land and water, and effectively removing all legal grounds for First Nations communities to determine what happens within their territories.

Crystal Lameman with the Beaver Lake First Nation argues that the Harper government has ignored its duty to consult with First Nations on the changes:

"In our treaty, it says that we will always be able to go to the land to subsist, but when you are pulling fish from the lake that have cancers hanging off of them, and that the migration pattern of the Woodland caribou are being affected, that's our basic human rights being violated."

Protests were also held in other Canadian cities including Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto.



 SAMSON CREE FIRST NATION PRESS RELEASE:

“Pipes will be lifted in support of Idle No More; this pipe ceremony will signify peace between two Nations and with the Creator. The presence of the pipe signifies the pipe laws of gentleness, compassion and mutual respect.”

The Cree of Maskwacis will be holding a pipe ceremony and peaceful demonstration on Hwy 2A at Maskwacis. For that purpose, a portion of the main highway between the Highway 611 West and Pe Sakastew Correctional Centre will be blocked between 11:15 am and 12:15 pm. 

Alternate routes will be posted for those travelers who are not able to stay and support the peaceful demonstration.  

We are taking this opportunity, coinciding with 12th hour of the 12th day of December 2012, to bring awareness to First Nations’ opposition to legislation proposed by the Harper government. 

We also want people to bring attention to the hunger strike started on Tuesday, December 11, 2012, by Chief Theresa Spence, Attawapiskat First Nation, a First Nation in northern Ontario, who has ‘vowed to ‘die’ for her people’. She has been quoted as saying: “I am willing to die for my people because the pain is too much and it’s time for the government to realize what it’s doing to us.”  

In the past term of office, the Harper government has introduced several pieces of legislation in the House of Commons and the Senate which will significantly impact the lives of First Nations’ people across Canada. Not only has this legislation been introduced without any real participation by the people affected by the legislation, it is being ‘fast-tracked’ through the House of Commons and the Senate.  

When First Nations people agreed to share their lands and resources with ‘newcomers’, First Nations could not have foreseen that, in time, not only would First Nations become landless, but that First Nations would have to conform to the ideologies, and world views of the ‘visitors’. That time has come to pass. Despite the adoption of the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, by the United Nations and subsequent ratification in Canada, Canada is unilaterally passing laws governing the First Nations without the free, prior and informed consent of the First Nations people.

The bills before the House of Commons and the Senate directly undermines First Nations’ right of self-determination, and subjugates First Nations people to a legal and political system that has not served the collective interests of First Nations.  

In Samson Cree Nation’s letter to the Member of Parliament for Wetaskiwin, Samson Cree Nation lobbied the MP to reject the proposed legislation, bring these matters to the grass roots people, and to obtain First Nations support for legislation that will directly affect the lives and future of First Nations before endorsing it in the House of Commons.

#IdleNoMore

Science of Cruelty?

Breaking Barriers (1986. Washington, D.C):



Oh what low creatures we are with all our rational self-confirming calculations. Better will we be when we wake up to the animal within. 

#inhumanism

Tom Sparrow on Sensation and Vulnerability

If you haven’t read Tom Sparrow’s work on carnal phenomenology and sensation yet you should do so immediately. Sparrow’s lucid explications of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Alphonso Lingis, Merleau-Ponty and others dealing in theories of embodiment and aesthetics are razor sharp and provocative - and his prose is pure a joy take in. Do yourself a favor: read him.

I recently returned to an article of Tom's called ‘Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis’, in which Tom clarifies Lingis’ substantial (if currently underrated) contribution to understanding both the primacy of sensation and what I refer to as ‘ontological vulnerability’ or the fundamental openness of things. Tom compares and contrasts Lingis’ views on embodied subjectivity and the flesh of the world with those who Lingis draws upon most – his predecessors in every sense – on the way to suggesting what could easily be held up as a radical philosophy of corporeality. The paper is substantial.

Below are some of the more interesting passages from the text:

Sensation intervenes in our practice and lets slip our hold on things and on ourselves. To deny its interruptive power is to deny the subordination of consciousness to the world of corporeal experience, to assert the primacy of human access to the sensuous world which we live from. It is to pretend that the phenomenal world has never once collapsed its appearance and asserted its fantastic weight upon our bodies…

There is a type of intelligibility nascent in sensibility, an intelligibility that is affective before it is intelligible and vital before it is rational. We might call this, following Straus, an alingual animal intelligibility. It is a pre-rational intelligence that we humans share with the other fleshy beings. We, as human-animal subjects, are already subjected to a sensuous medium that preempts the judgments and rational discourses we have either invented or acquired in order to master this medium and attempt to break off from the animal kingdom.

The circuit of rational discourse which is developed and deployed, the technological and sociocultural manufacture that we toil over to wrest ourselves free from the demands of our biological composition, and the community of modern individuals that each one of us is born into—all of this is preempted by our encounter with other bodies, intruder or seducer bodies, and the appeals they make on our own. This singular community of sustenance and separation is a community which is marked by the exposure of oneself to another in the sensuous medium. My flesh is nothing other than your flesh. But my body is at the same time exposed to your body, the body of some animal, and the totality of objects which are folded into the levels of the world.

Read More: Here

Tom Sparrow is a philosopher currently teaching at Slippery Rock University. His forthcoming book, Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology is highly anticipated, and he blogs at Plastic Bodies. I have also discussed his work previously here, here and here.

UPDATE: Tom just announced he will be publishing a new collection of essays called Levinas Unhinged with Zero Books. The book will explore what Tom describes as “the darker side” of Levinas’ philosophy, and will attempt to reach out to a new Levinas readership "by downplaying the usual slogans and paying more attention to aspects of Levinas that are typically overshadowed by his ethics, the face, the other, etc." Learn more: here.

Merleau-Ponty on Truth and Experience in Metaphysics

I often argue with people about the importance of reading through the correlationist tendencies in Merleau-Ponty's work in order to grasp the more radical conclusions of his philosophy of immanence and embodied experience. It is true that Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we can only know the world as it is 'for-us', but it is equally true and important that the world and our knowing it are not two, ontologically speaking, but rather deeply intertwinned realities ultimately generated from the same ontological matrix, or Flesh of reality. That is, we may know the world in human terms, but we do so intimately because our embodied perceptions (and sensations) are not ontologically 'other than' that which we seek to know. We are made of the same stuff.

From Merleau-Ponty’s Sense and Non-Sense:

“The germ of universality or the “natural light” without which there could be no knowledge is to be found ahead of us, in the thing where our perception places us, in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us. Metaphysics begins from the moment when, ceasing to live in the evidence of the object – whether it is the sensory object or the object of science – we apperceive the radical subjectivity of all our experience as inseparable from its truth value. It means two things to say that our experience is our own: both that it is not the measure of all imaginable being in itself and that it is nonetheless co-extensive with all beings of which we can form a notion. This double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics: I am sure that there is being – on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being-for-me. When I am aware of sensing, I am not, on the one hand, conscious of my state and, on the other, of a certain sensuous quality such as red or blue – but red or blue are nothing other than my different ways of running my eyes over what is offered to me and of responding to its solicitation… Metaphysics is the deliberate intention to describe this paradox of consciousness and truth, exchange and communication, in which science lives and which it encounters in the guise of vanquished difficulties or failures to be made good but which it does not thematize. From the moment I recognize that my experience, precisely insofar as it is my own, makes me accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the world and to others, all the beings which objective thoughts placed at a distance draw singularly nearer to me . . . Metaphysical consciousness has no other objects than those of experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them as all settled, as consequences with no premises, as if they were self evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing.” 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 93-94.

Isabelle Stengers on Cosmopolitics

h/t Footnotes2Plato

DeLanda on Cosmological Syntheses, Subjectivity and New Materialism

Open Humanities Press has made available the latest book in the New Metaphysics series titled, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies: online and free here.

The following excerpts are from chapter two, “Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds” - Interview with Manuel DeLanda:

Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev’s terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.  

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze & Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.

... 

I surely reject the idea that morphogenesis needs any “mind” to operate. I also reject the neo-Kantian thesis of the linguisticality of experience. To assume that human experience is structured conceptually is to dehistoricize the human species: we spent hundreds of thousands of years as a social species, with a division of labor (hunters, gatherers) and sophisticated stone tool technology. Language is a relatively recent acquisition. Are we to assume that those ancient hunter gatherers lived in an amorphous world waiting for language to give it form?

...
 

A theory of the subject is absolutely necessary but it must be based on Hume, not on Kant: subjective experience not as organized conceptually by categories but as literally composed of intensities (of color, sound, aroma, flavor, texture) that are given structure by habitual action. Recent developments in artificial intelligence will help with this: while the old symbolic school is deeply Kantian, the new connectionist school (based on neural nets that are not programmed but trained) points to a way out. Current neural net designs are at the level of insect intelligence but they already suggest how an insect protosubjectivity can emerge from a dynamic of perceived intensities. We need to extend this to the subjectivity of mammals and birds, and work our way up to human subjectivity. The political implication of this can be phrased as follows: rejecting the linguisticality of experience (according to which every culture lives in its own world) leads to a conception of a shared human experience in which the variation comes not from differences in signification (which is a linguistic notion), but of significance (which is a pragmatic one). Different cultures do attribute different importance, relevance, or significance to different things because their practices (not their minds) are different.

Read the rest of the interview here.  h/t Adam Robbert

God and the Organism: A Dialogue with John Protevi

John Protevi is one of the most stimulating cross-paradimatic philosophers working today. His profound exploration of the possible intersections between Deleuze, cognitive science and dynamical systems theories is a powerful example of how empirical research and speculative philosophy can fit together to illuminate the complexly of human existence on this planet. His book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (2009) is one of my all-time favourites. Learn more about John's work at his website: here      

From Christopher Long's Digital Dialogue series:

 

Digital Dialogue 56: God and the Organism from Christopher Long on Vimeo.

Description: John Protevi, Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University, joins me for episode 56 of the Digital Dialogue, God and the Organism. John's work focuses on Continental phenomenology and, more specifically, on contemporary French philosophy. In addition to his many publications on embodied cognition and French philosophy, his book, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, came out with University of Minnesota Press in 2009, and he has another book, Life, Earth, War: Deleuzean Interventions, forthcoming with Minnesota Press.

h/t dmf

The Communist Manifesto

by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

(Full Version, English)

Acts of Thought – Part 2: Thinking The In-between

In response to a previous abbreviated version of comments I made in my last post Adam wrote:

I’m basically in agreement with everything you’re saying, and I apologize for not highlighting more clearly the points you make above (something I chalk up to the brevity of my little excerpt). Some quick points that will need to be developed elsewhere: I don’t mean ideas in the neoplatonic sense. Rather, I’m fully with you Michael when you write:

“The projection of ideas are expressions and speech-acts (gesture) with consequences. That is, imaginal projections (ideas) only ever have potency/agency in the context of (and amplified by) specific elements with ecologies of written words, books, linguistic conventions, individual speech-acts of hominids, and cultural images.”

But it’s precisely the mobility of ideas that strikes me here: they may always originate in human speech acts (or writings, compositions etc.) but it’s the recursivity of what Whitehead calls “modes of thought” that I am particularly interested in. Ideas are something that humans do, precisely as you describe, but I also want to argue that they are (in)formative of psyches and subjectivities beyond the initial act of doing, and that this activity constitutes an active ecology of ideas when placed within the context of communities of thinking-speaking-acting humans. [source]

To a certain extent I agree with Adam that ideologies (in the broadest sense of this term) ‘inform’ our thinking, or acts of thought, but what I want to avoid is the suggestion that ideas are somehow distinct or independent entities from the ongoing interplay (enaction) between animals and their artifacts (words, symbols, images). This might seem like a minor difference in emphasis, but I think we need to be very precise because it is exactly the issue of thinking in-between-ness that is important here. If, as I argue, ideation is primarily a non-local result of the living engagement of imaginative humans with nonhumans, as opposed to interactions with supposedly autonomous chunks of information, then we need to begin thinking differently about how individual subjectivity works in relation to, among other issues, political cognition.

For example, if ideas are dependent upon and enacted by living bodies relating to other entities then we must pay greater attention to the ecological-relational and material conditions within which our experiences and acts of thought are generated. Thinking the precise nature of the ‘in-between-ness’ or compositional character of ideation and embodied semiotics is a prerequisite for effectively tracking and then changing the conditions in which we exist together. That is to say eco-material 'infrastructure' as the immanent plane of consistency and relationality matters. Ideas are not actants/objects/agents but instead are the enacted phantasies of animals living in particular socio-material conditions.

Adam continiues:

We agree on some of these points very closely, but where I take off in a different direction from your assessment follows from your statement that:

“We are animals coping in the world with practical communication and social gestures embedded within modes of existence which have their own historically evolved language-games. And by reifying our acts of thought as “things” we reduce the complexity involved and needlessly obfuscate what is essentially a distributed body-brain-culture-community event.”

I think by acknowledging the presence of ideas as real artifacts in the constitution of experience, I’m honoring complexity not detracting from it. Further, by pointing to the thing-liness of the idea I am precisely calling out the ways in which ideas are deeply embedded in situated processes of human-matter-media perception, and my aim is to explore in an experimental/ecological way the manners in which specific modes of thinking carve out the always-more complex world in which we live and act. The crux for me is that it matters what kinds of ideas and concepts we use to think about and act within the world; the idea is an ecological event with ecological consequences that must be understood as an actor if subjectivity is to be adequately theorized from an ecological perspective. [source]

 Again, I think the nuances here are important. Ideas are not artifacts unless they are actual images (symbols, photographs, etc) or texts (articles, books, poems, policy manuals) or devices. It is through our acts of thought and body that we generate objects/artifacts capable of triggering imaginal-emotional-neurological responses, but the power and potency of such artifacts are not a feature of some intrinsic and autonomous properties or capacity of ideas as such, but rather a function of their entanglement and distributed activation within meshes of biological memory and social convention. Ideas, then, do not form or inform their own ecologies but are part of a more general integrated material-energetic and imaginal ecology of things. And figuring out the distributed, non-local dynamics of such enactive contexts allows humans to begin behaving, manipulating and adapting in more creative ways.

Acts of Thought - Part 1: Ideation as Distributed Activity

The following comments were provoked by an email from a very resourceful friend regarding a recent series of excerpts (here and here) by Adam at Knowledge Ecology. And please bear with me here as I'm struggling to articulate much of what I want to express on these issues.

First let me say, without a doubt, Adam and I hold some very similar positions on what we interpret as the processual, evolving and ecological nature of things. And, as I have stated in the past, I don’t think I have ever met someone as young as Adam who has such a rare combination of intelligence, compassion and character. I follow his blog religiously and I will track his progress and academic work well into the future.

However Adam and I also hold some strongly conflicting views (specifically about panexperientialism, object-oriented philosophy, materialism and Whitehead) - which is fine as far as it goes, because I don’t presume to have definitive knowledge about all the issues, or even be completely on target about what I think I know. I am often more interested in exploring the issues on which I disagree with someone than when I agree with them - if only because I find it more productive to consider what they know that I may have missed and/or if my beliefs are self-consistent enough to withstand scrutiny from opposing views. In short, I learn more from discussions with those I disagree with than the opposite. Adam just happens to be one of those thinkers who I find a lot of common ground with but who also challenges me to rethink my position on major topics. And so the following comments are meant in the spirit of mutual exploration and inquiry.

Adam writes:

Knowledge ecologies have important implications for how we think about ideas. In the world of human knowledge, the idea acts as a cosmogram; an actor that is part of its surrounding terrain, an abstraction that is part of the territory it describes, exerting a pull on the world it tries to map. Ideas are things that, once generated by the thinker, immediately gain their own autonomy and ability to re-arrange other ideas. Plainly stated, ideas exist in the world in the same way as any other ecological actor; ideas are a part of the actuality of experience and are therefore amenable to an ecological interpretation. When mediated through the appropriate media ecologies, ideas can then impact the physical form of any other entity within their reach. As an abstraction, the idea is also a cryptogram, concealing certain features of the terrain it helps to enact. The contrast between the revealing and concealing character of the idea speaks to the fact that no single mode of thought has a monopoly on the real; rather, every idea is partial and relative to its ecology, capable only of exposing certain features of a more complex landscape. In this way knowledge ecology has a complex relationship to media ecology since both are actively foregrounding and backgrounding different aspects of a more complex reality. [source]

I’m not at all comfortable with the notion that ideas are objects. Ideas seem to me more like something actors do, as expressions of objects, than things or actors as such. Of course it all depends on what we are willing to call an object. The first question that I would ask someone who believes ideas to be objects is where exactly is an idea? What place do ideas occupy in space-time? What are their components? For something to be a thing I believe it has to have location, 'simple' or otherwise.

Alternatively, I believe ideas are enacted and associative images (cf. imagination, imaginal) instantiated and projected by bodies/brains viz. the deployment of pubic languages/symbolics. As Wittgenstein argued, there are no "private languages". The linguistic tokens (signifiers) we use to perform our thought-acts and speech-acts are embedded in conventional and historical (cultural) systems and we necessarily derive our conceptual content from this reservoir of semantic resources and normative associations. Therefore ideas are actually private imaginings and recombinations of public (social) referents. Such private imaginings are fleeting and ephemeral products without substantial properties of their own, and only ever arising from and instantiated by specific assemblages of bodies, brains, codes, concepts, memories, habits and communications. Ideas are not objects, anymore than digestion or emotions are. Ideation is something animals do.
 
Now one might be tempted to label me an eliminativist in this regard (which is fine as far as that goes), but I certainly don’t believe our ideas and beliefs are without bearing on the world, nor do I deny that our imaginations extend the strictly physical capacities of the human body. I think humans, and most animals, have complex phenomenological lives (qualia) that cannot be reduced via appeals to the activity of the brain alone. To explain precisely why I suggest that the qualitative, imaginal aspects of experience are irreducible, and exactly how imagination emerges from matter to be an extension of material is a massive endeavor not possible here. However, an ultra-brief, somewhat fuzzy sketch might run something like this:

Human’s love their phantasies. Endowed with big brains and socially evolved circuitous libidos, language-use evolved and emerged from more primitive capacities for gestural expression and communication. Proto-humans slowly added grunts and tonal sounds to our strictly physical, non-verbal gestures and expressions over a long period of time. Eventually those grunts (acoustic gestures) and manners of communicating became habituated and socially recognized norms of reference (with variable affective triggers and resonations), which in turn allowed collective reference to become collective memories and systems of tokened conventional signification ('culture'). Such social and habitual referencing and communicating forms what Geertz, following Max Weber, referred to as “webs of signification”.

At some point during this evolution of signification metaphor and image began to afford useful (adaptive) enough abstraction that 1) our brain's configuration fundamentally changed such that 2) our experience the world was drastically altered. Our ancestors started to generate elaborate mental associations and imaginal projections and combinations, which in turn gave rise to increasingly bulky narratives, mythologies, ideologies, cave paintings and whole sets of transmissible artifacts of thought (e.g., hieroglyph, writing, etc.). That is, our mental projections/phantasies can and often do become static or captivated or fermented as artifacts through the fashioning of explicit images, symbols, writing, and other physical representations. It is these dead representations, these tokens of phantasy (of which ‘fantasy’ in the pejorative sense is only a sub-species), that become the objects of our consideration. These artifacts, paintings, books, films, and objects are fully ecological, agentic assemblages, and part of the wider materiality and relationality of things - and so become part of the distributed network of sensitivities from which we draw our experience.

With this advance in conceptuality we started a great love affair with our own thoughts and phantasies, which culminated in all sorts of folk-ontologies and collective imaginings that objectified thought as 'thing'. These personal and collective conceptions/stories we tell each other about how the non-conceptual, nonhuman world works become orthodoxies of arrogance, unrecognizable as the secondary tokens of imagination that they truly are. This is also how we began to mistake our conceptions for our perceptions.

What is important in my story of the rise of conceptuality here is that ideation, as phantasy or imagination, is an emergent capacity for gestural expression, not to be identified or equated with the symbolic tokens and actifacts that are produced by such capacities. The activity of thought is an imaginal act: something we do and engage in. Acts of thought are elaborations of the primitive gestures of embodied animal relations embedded in extensive networks of brain/body, environmental and interpersonal processes. So in no sense is an ‘idea’ a fully autonomous (withdrawn) object within this network. Ideas, like the languages they emerge from, cannot be things in their own right because they require and only ever  exist within wider assemblages of sociality and biology. Ecologies of signification and imagination cannot be differentiated from the social and material context in which they exist. What Adam calls 'knowledge ecologies', then, are inseparable from those aspects of the more general and distributed ecology of matter, energy and expression.

Adam writes:

While knowledge ecologies are not exclusive to humans, it is in the context of the human that we find the explosion of many new knowledge ecologies (e.g., worldviews, paradigms, ideologies, myths, and other subtle ecosystems) exerting their own gravitational pull upon other actualities of experience. To be sure, an idea may not have the physical substantiality of a hammer or submarine, but it would be difficult to argue that ideas don’t impact the material conditions of the entities around them. In many cases it is an idea (neoliberal economics, for example) that is the decisive factor in generating relations between humans and nonhumans. A study of knowledge ecologies would thus include the role ideas, worldviews, paradigms, or ideologies play in co-shaping human and more-than-human worlds. [source]

So what are ideas if not actual substances? Are they Platonic forms? If, as I argue above, ideas are individual and collective associative-projections deploying pubic concepts and embedded within complex configurations of materiality, media and social relation, then it is not ideas which "impact the material conditions of the entities around them", but the specific acts of thought and communication (expressions) of particular material entities. Which is to say, imagining-bodies act and communicate and express in ways that affect, resonate with, coordinate or conflict with other entities and ecological systems. Ideas do not have agency or thing-power imagining bodies do. And if we want to study the power of group thinking and discourse then we must investigate what imaginative bodies actually do and say; we have to understand human expressions and acts of thought in the contexts they occur.

As Cowley states:

While many take language to be 'real', I regard this as misleading. Instead, it is traced to a meshwork of dynamical processes, imagination and how we use heterogeneous artefacts. Language, like mind, is a social product. Thus, as children, we come to take a language stance. Rejecting the tradition of idealizing language away from behaviour, I distinguish the dynamics of human dialogue from the second-order cultural constructs (words and meanings) emphasized in structuralist traditions. Language, on this view, is triply grounded: it connects embrained bodies, cultural processes and first-person phenomenology. [source]

In some sense, maybe, ideas could be better understood as hyperobjects – massively distributed in time-space and only locally manifested in partial ways. But even if this is the case I would still argue that ideas and ideologies (as larger sets of ideas) are still only aspects of a wider, integrated and more complex ecology, and not ecologies in their own right. Ideas are always already implicated in more general regimes of attraction.

But perhaps it’s a problem of vocabulary? A problem of misplaced nouns? I agree with Adam that ideas do have impact in the world, but, again, they do so not as 'objects', but through the expressions or actions of real material entities and their artifacts (e.g., as written symbols, books, blueprints, policy manuals, laws, etc.). The projection of ideas as expressions and speech-acts (gestures) certainly have consequence. But ideation (as acts of thought) is an embodied, enacted and ecologically implicated activity, not to be confused with the artifacts of its process.

We are animals coping in the world with practical communication and social gestures embedded within modes of existence which have their own historically evolved language-games. And by reifying our acts of thought as “things” we reduce the complexity involved and needlessly obfuscate what is essentially a distributed body-brain-culture-community event.

Demystifying the Higgs Boson

From Open Culture:

Demystifying the Higgs Boson with Leonard Susskind, the Father of String Theory in Physics | September 6th, 2012


In early July, researchers working at CERN in Europe announced they had found it — the Higgs Boson. Finally, we had proof of a theory first formulated in 1964. It was a big day. Physicists everywhere rejoiced. The media did too. But the media coverage didn’t help the public understand the discovery very well. Leonard Susskind, a prominent theoretical physicist at Stanford, realized that. So, days later, he gave a free public lecture where he explained how the Higgs mechanism works and what it actually means to “give mass to particles.” And it all involved taking his audience through some basic quantum mechanics and explaining the concept of fields, plus using a handy-dandy sombrero for a prop. You can watch the full presentation above.

John Searle on Consciousness and Causality

John R. Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959. About "consciousness" Searle argues for a view he calls biological naturalism, which holds that consciousness is BOTH a real subjective experience and caused by the physical processes of the brain. He often compares subjective activity to digestion - i.e. something that a body endowed with certain organs does. Consciousness, for Searle, is not mysterious nor abstract, but just what brains in environments do.

Searle introduced the technical term the Background in his book, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983). Searle calls the Background the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background") and Bourdieu's habitus.

And I argue that an apprehension the Background reveals both a deep biological unconsciousness that limits and liberates thought, and a radical sociophysical consistency ("the Great Outdoors") at the heart of subjectivity. Confronting the Background conceptually and phenomenologically gives way to an experience of the auto-affectivity of the body as flesh embedded in a consequential world.

Below is Searle's 2012 talk 'Consciousness and Causality' delivered at this summer's Evolution and Function of Consciousness Summer School held at the University of Montreal as part of Alan Turing Year.
Here Searle presents many of his classical arguments about human subjectivity. Check it out:


 

James Scott - The Art of Not Being Governed

From Yale University:

The author of several books including Seeing Like a State and Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Anthropologist and university Professor James Scott's research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. We talk with Professor Scott about his newest book, The Art of Not Being Governed. It is the first-ever examination of the volumes of literature on state-making that evaluates why people would deliberately remain stateless.

James Scott, is Sterling Professor of Political Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University

On Fighting and Philosophy

Recently my good friend and talented artist Aurelio Madrid asked if he could interview me about my experiences and background in both Mixed Martial-Arts (MMA) and academics. At first I was hesitant – enjoying my near total anonymity with regards to online affairs – but upon reflection I started thinking it might be a nice opportunity for me to think biographically for a change, as I am near pathologically anti-nostalgic, especially about my own life. The here and now is where all the action is. So Aurelio and I set to work, exchanged a few emails and the result of that conversation can be found on Aurelio’s blog HERE for anyone interested.

In retrospect I think I could have answered his questions a little more succinctly, but what comes through is perhaps a slice of who I am and where I am coming from. As I come to the end of my fighting career I am realizing just how much I have learned from martial-arts. Wisdom is the achievement of engaged bodies - beings fully of this world; and philosophy is more than reading books and measuring words: it is lived.

Below is an excerpt of me talking about embodied realism from the interview:

I think the most important philosophical insight I have had from combat sports came to me directly after my first loss in the cage. I competed against a much more experienced and dedicated fighter and was beaten pretty soundly despite going the full three rounds. A few days afterwards, I was reading some article on radical skepticism and Kant, and it struck me as so completely and brutally absurd that anyone could ever claim that humans do not have the capacity for direct experiential access to objects as such. Basically, here I was unintentionally beaten, bruised and deeply and emotionally affected while some professor sitting in some library was dreaming and writing about how humans do not directly experience things-in-themselves. Well, my experience and the state of my body demonstrated quite the opposite. What fighting has proved to me – beyond any sort of linguistic demonstration or logical construction – is that entities external to my perception and control have direct access to my substantial being. The plane of action is immanent. Not only did I experience my opponent’s powers cognitively but a felt them structurally, in the way he was able to intervene on my existence and disable (temporarily) certain aspects of my characteristic functionality. Never had I felt so affected. So I know that objects and entities can and do have direct and highly consequential contacts with each other. Realism is THE default position for anyone who experiences the world as a whole/embodied being. Ontologically speaking, we are open and vulnerable systems. After five minutes in a locked cage with a trained opponent, I believe anyone would become a realist…

Read the Full Interview: HERE



Please note that the picture above is from Seattle based photographer Adam Smith. Check out his amazing body of work: here and on Tumblr: here. Comments, questions and/or trolling are more than welcome.

Thus Spake Santayana

Once upon a time I considered in all seriousness doing a dissertation on the work of George Santayana – specifically his epistemology and thoughts on “animal faith”.

In the past Santayana was often included in lists of American pragmatists, but more recently scholars have refined that view to include an appreciation for the uniqueness of his contributions. As a philosopher Santayana's literary elegance masked a rigorous commitment to clear and distinct thought; he was a humble materialist when it was not in fashion and a skeptic at a time when most of his contemporaries clamored to pronounce their claim on Truth. According to Santayana, “scepticism is an exercise, not a life; it is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely” (1923: 69).

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Santayana's anti-foundationalism, non-reductive materialism, and pragmatic naturalism coupled with his emphasis on the spiritual life and his view of philosophy as literature anticipated many developments in philosophy and literary criticism that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century, and these served as a challenge to the more humanistic naturalisms of John Dewey and other American naturalists.

In a few words: I believe Santayana’s time has not yet come.

“I have a great respect for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain everywhere. I think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to finding some detail the key to the whole. I am animated by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind: they are ill expressed, but they are well grounded. What novelty my version of things may possess is meant simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by giving to everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form. I do not pretend to place myself at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its periphery. I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then from another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more extensive and complex. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life…” [Santayana 1923]

It seems to me those who quietly track the triumph of tangible realities over speculative fancy are not only the most practical of humans but also the wisest:

“[M]y materialism, for all that, is not metaphysical. I do not profess to know what matter is in itself, and feel no confidence in the divination of those esprits forts who, leading a life of vice, thought the universe must be composed of nothing but dice and billiard-balls. I wait for the men of science to tell me what matter is, in so far as they can discover it, and am not at all surprised or troubled at the abstractness and vagueness of their ultimate conceptions : how should our notions of things so remote from the scale and scope of our senses be anything but schematic ? But whatever matter may be, I call it matter boldly, as I call my acquaintances Smith and Jones without knowing their secrets : whatever it may be, it must present the aspects and undergo the motions of the gross objects that fill the world : and if belief in the existence of hidden parts and movements in nature be metaphysics, then the kitchen-maid is a metaphysician whenever she peels a potato.” [Santayana 1923]

Learn more about Santayana’s legacy: here, here and here

UPDATE: More Santayana Aphorisms

“A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.”

“All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”

“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.”

“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”

“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

#santayana

Kingdom Come?

Selina Kyle: There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.

Bruce Wayne: You sound like you're looking forward to it.

Selina Kyle: I'm adaptable.




#darkestbeforethestorm

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism?

The question of anarchism as a viable poltical stance has always bothered me. I tend towards a more communistic, collectivist political perspective, but perhaps what is called for under the contemporary conditions is something more deconstructive and wild? This remains an open question for me.

Audio from day two of the 2011 symposium The Anarchist Turn:

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism
By The Invisible Committee

LISTEN HERE:

Information about the symposium from the conference organizers:

For a long time, the word ‘anarchist’ has been used as an insult. This is because, at least since Thomas Hobbes, the concept of anarchy has been extended from its etymological meaning (absence of centralized government) to that of pure disorder – the idea being that, without a sovereign state, the life of individuals can only be brutish, miserable, and chaotic. This move was certainly functional to the ideological justification of modern sovereign states, but not to an understanding of what anarchy might be.

In the last decade, this caricature of anarchy has begun to crack. Globalization and the social movements it spawned seem to have proved what anarchists have long been advocating: an anarchical order is not just desirable, but also feasible. This has led to a revitalized interest in the subterranean anarchist tradition and its understanding of anarchy as collective self-organization without centralized authority. But the ban on ‘anarchism’ has not yet been lifted.

The aim of this conference is to argue for an ‘anarchist turn’ in political philosophy. We want to discuss the anarchist hypothesis with specific reference to the philosophical tradition in its many historical and geographical variants, but also in relation to other disciplines like politics, anthropology, economics, history and sociology. By bringing together academics and activists, past and present, this conference will assess the nature and effectiveness of anarchist politics in our times.

Speakers: Miguel Abensour (Paris VII), Cinzia Arruzza (New School), Banu Bargu (New School), Chiara Bottici (New School), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley), Laura Corradi (Calabria), Stephen Duncombe (NYU), Todd May (Clemson), Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths), Mitchell Verter (New School), Stephanie Wakefield (CUNY), as well as writers such as Andrej Grubačić , Cindy Milstein, Ben Morea from Black Mask and alleged authors of The Coming Insurrection.

Learn More: Here

Extinction, Denial and Adaptation: Towards Post-Nihilist Praxis?

"Man can build his greatness on the nothingness that crushes him." - André Malraux

Levi Bryant has another fantastic post up (here) discussing the aim of speculative realism in relation to nihilism and extinction more generally. I think Levi is on target with his comments about how North Americans seem to be working through our growing realization of the possibility (probability) of extinction in the face of ecological collapse (among other calamities). I believe this “awareness” is still mostly registering on subconscious levels - i.e., biologically as toxins, ecologically as climate, hurricanes, floods – and denied or obfuscated on political and ideological levels, but it is definitely becoming expressed.

The following are some key passages from Levi’s post:

Everything hinges on asking why the critique of correlationism– the most contentious and controversial dimension of SR –has arisen at this point in history. Why have so many suddenly become impassioned with the question of how it is possible to think a world without humans or being without thought? It is such a peculiar question, such a queer question, such a strange question. Why, after all, would we even be concerned with what the world might be apart from us when we are here and regard this world? There are, of course, all sorts of good ontological and epistemological reasons for raising these questions. Yet apart from immanent philosophical reasons, philosophy is always haunted by a shadow text, a different set of reasons that are not so much of the discursive order as of the order of the existential and historical situation and which thought finds itself immersed at a given point in history. Over and above– or perhaps below and behind –the strictly discursive philosophical necessity for a particular sort of thought, is the existential imperative to think something. Here the issue is not one of establishing how a certain philosophical imperative demands a response to a strictly philosophical question, but of addressing the question of why a particular question begins to resonate at all at this point in history and not in others…

…if I were to hazard a guess as to why the critique of correlationism, the thought of a world without humans, has suddenly become a burning one, then my suggestion would be that this is because we are facing the imminent possibility of a world that is truly without humans. If it has become necessary to think the possibility of a world without humans, then this is because we face a future– due to the coming climate apocalypse –of a world that truly is without humans…

Culture can be seen as a symptomatic thinking through– veiled and concealed, while nonetheless present and on the surface right there before our eyes –of the Real of its historical moment. This seems to be the case with apocalyptic films and movements in recent decades. What we seem to be thinking through is the possibility of our own extinction or, at the very least, the extinction of the world as we know it.

Speculative realism is important because several of the authors involved seem interested in operationalizing the need for novel understandings and engagements with the creeping potencies of the nonhuman and the precarious. SR offers widely dispersed possibilities for reconsidering human thought and behavior after the hideous yet enlightening realizations of being-in-a-material-world.

My sense is that North Americans currently tend to reject such realizations and then bury the accompanying dread of finitude and animality through consumption and/or fantasy - with T.V or crystal meth no less than simply commodities - in order to sooth the pain of their existential fears and resentments. To be sure, there are variances in the manner people respond but i believe the push and pull of consumption and distraction remain paramount.

I’m reminded of Ernest Becker’s work in this regard:

“Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power¬lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his symbolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one accidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of ab-surdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?” (Becker, The Denial of Death, p.58-59)

 As Heidegger argues with tremendous force in Being and Time, humans are fundamentally coping-beings. By composition and disposition we seek to make-sense and understand ourselves. We are the weirdo-beings that give a damn about being – creatures required by circumstance to adapt. But what adaptations are possible for us this late in the ‘game’?

As Levi states:

It is our circumstances themselves, the material reality of our world, that has become nihilistic, not the thought of this or that thinker. Indeed, I suspect that many of us are terrified and anguished by this objective nihilistic darkness that approaches and that may very well have happened, as Timothy Morton suggests. Perhaps we are already dead and we just don’t yet know it.

I believe the task of intellectuals (and not just philosophers) today is to indulge rather than mask the nihilistic forces of contemporary life – forces which manifest in both subjective and objective ways. Partaking in the dark revelations of current ecologies can only push us further towards more earthly, or creaturely, that is to say materialist modes of thinking and doing. Thinking the visceral and consequential facticity of intercorporeality entails thinking about our intimate connections as immanent achievements (our continuity with ‘nature’) and our vulnerability (or precarity with-in ‘nature’) simultaneously. We will have to effectively integrate the facticity of matter as matter in order to generate useful and mutually understandable expressions and sentiments among participants (or at least those of us left behind, so to speak). The practical motivations of material and speculative adaptation and communicability are at the core of any possible species of ecological and humanist thought.

"[T]he disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the 'great chain of being' and defaced the 'book of the world' is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment" (Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. xi)

 Of course, we could take up the lines purposed by Brassier, or by Laruelle, or the eliminativists, or cleanse our phantasies in the rhetorical psychedelica of Timothy Morton, or even come up with our own codes and performances capable of limiting thought and opening us to the intercorporeal facticity of life - to Life as Flesh - but even this would be only a gesture. The important work to be done is decidedly practical. We must build new infrastructures.

DeLanda on Temporal Beings

Manuel De Landa on temporal flows and the "hardenings" of reality:

"In terms of the nonlinear dynamics of our planet, the thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps the earth's least important component. The crust is, indeed, a mere hardening within the greater system of underground lava flows which, organizing themselves into large "conveyor belts"(convective cells), are the main factor in the genesis of the most salient and apparently durable structures of the crusty surface. Either directly, via volcanic activity, or indirectly, by forcing continental plates to collide, thereby creating the great folded mountain ranges, it is the self-organized activity of lava flows that is at the origin of many geological forms. If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed (by solidification and remelting) and that even continental crust is under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined simply by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. 

Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms. Here, too, we might be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chainging to our organic bodies and cultural minds and by the time scale of the binding operation. Over the millennia, it is the flow of biomass through foodwebs, as well as the flow of genes through generations, that matters, not the bodies and species that emerge from these flows. Our languages may also be seen overtime as momentary slowing downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that gives rise to a multitude of different structures. And a similar point applies to our institutions,which may also be considered transitory hardenings in the flows of money, routines,and prestige, and, if they have acquired a permanent building to house them, in the mineral flows from which the construction materials derive.  

This book has concerned itself with a historical survey of these flows of "stuff," as well as with the hardenings themselves, since once they emerge they react back on the flows to constrain them in a variety of ways."

[ From: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 1997, p. 257-259 - Swerve edition ]

Pretty?

ht / xenophrenia

is survivalism the religion of the future?

Music video by Jay-Z & Kanye West performing No Church In The Wild feat. Frank Ocean & The-Dream (2012)

 

Art?

0082

Manuel DeLanda on Emergence, Causality and Realism

From The Speculative Turn (p.381-392):

Emergence, Causality and Realism

By Manuel DeLanda

"If a body is propelled in two directions by two forces, one tending to drive it to the north and the other to the east, it is caused to move in a given time exactly as far in both directions as the two forces would separately have carried it; and it is left precisely where it would have arrived if it had been acted upon first by one of the two forces, and afterwards by the other. [...] I shall give the name of the Composition of Causes to the principle which is exemplified in all cases in which the joint effect of several causes is identical with the sum of their separate effects. [...] This principle, however, by no means prevails in all departments of the field of nature. The chemical ombination of two substances produces, as is well known, a third substance with properties different from those of either of the two substances separately, or both of them taken together. Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or of oxygen is observable in those of their compound, water."  — John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic

With these words John Stuart Mill began the modern debate on the question of emergence. While he himself did not use the term, one of its definitions, that of a property of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is clearly stated in this quote. Mill goes on to qualify this statement because two joint causes may interfere with each other and subtract rather than add their effects: a reservoir may be fed by a stream of water on one side while a drain empties it on the other side, the joint product being no change in the amount of water stored. Yet, for Mill, this is just another version of the Composition of Causes. So the real distinction between physical and chemical interactions is not so much that a joint effect is a mere sum but that it is entirely different or novel, ‘as in the experiment of two liquids which, when mixed in certain proportions, instantly become, not a larger amount of liquid, but a solid mass’. The term ‘emergent’ was introduced in 1875 by another philosopher, George Henry Lewes, also in the context of a discussion of joint causes and their effects. When two separate causes simply add or mix themselves in their joint effect, so that we can see their agency in action in that effect, the result is a mere ‘resultant’ but if there is novelty or heterogeneity in the effect then we may speak of an ‘emergent’.

Both authors viewed the difference between physics and chemistry as pivoting on the possibility of explanation: while in physics to explain an effect is to deduce it from a law, in chemistry deduction is not possible because of the existence of novelty in the effect. To know what effect the combination of two causes will have, what molecule will be synthesized from the interaction of two different atoms, for example, one needs to actually carry out an experiment. Mill did not think that this was a cause for despair: in due time chemical laws could be discovered that made the properties of water, for instance, deducible from those of oxygen and hydrogen. But to Lewes this possibility implied that water would cease to be an emergent and would become a resultant. As he wrote: ‘Some day, perhaps, we shall be able to express the unseen process in a mathematical formula; till then we must regard the water as an emergent’. In other words, something is an emergent only to the extent that we cannot deduce it from a law, and it ceases to be so the moment a law becomes available. This is an unfortunate conclusion, one that involves a serious misunderstanding of the nature of explanation in general and of causal explanation in particular.

Read More (PDF) @ re.press

Goldman Sachs is a Financial Terrorist Organization

Goldman Sachs is an organization of financial terrorists who have co-opted the American government. They have extorted the U.S congress, emptied the treasury coffers and financed the exploitation of people and markets all over this planet. They contribute nothing but fraud and destruction to the project of civilization. Why are Americans still putting up with this company?

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment banking and securities firm that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and is headquartered at 200 West Street in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City, with additional offices in international financial centres.

Former employees include Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, as well as Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada since 2008, Mario Draghi, governor of the European Central Bank, Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister, and former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson is the current chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, despite President Barack Obama's campaign promise that he would limit the influence of lobbyists in his administration.[source]

In February 2011, the Washington Examiner reported that Goldman Sachs was "the company from which Obama raised the most money in 2008" and that its "CEO Lloyd Blankfein has visited the White House 10 times."[source]

During the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, Goldman was able to profit from the collapse in subprime mortgage bonds in the summer of 2007 by short-selling subprime mortgage-backed securities. Two Goldman traders, Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, are credited with bearing responsibility for the firm's large profits during America's sub-prime mortgage crisis.[source] The pair, members of Goldman's structured products group in New York, made a profit of $4 billion by "betting" on a collapse in the sub-prime market, and shorting mortgage-related securities. [source]

Here is Former Attorney General of New York Elliot Spitzer breaking it down on CNN: 

And Max Keiser on French TV giving his take:

  

The trailer for the documentary INSIDE JOB: 

Speculation and Confronting the Real

"It is no longer thought that determines the object, whether through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought and forces it to think it, or better, according to it. As we have seen, this objective determination takes the form of a unilateral duality whereby the object thinks through the subject." — Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, p 149

Sometimes we protest too much. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is essential for me because he wrote about the primacy of perception (prior to conception), and how the immediacy of the world underlies our conceptions of it. There is a pre-reflective tangibility to Being that opens up meaning as consequence. Perception prior to conception. The Real is that which remains after we shut the fuck up. Whatever story we want to tell is so much less than the primacy of this tangible reality.

“So long as the 'me' is the observer, the one who gathers experience, strengthens himself through experience, there can be no radical change, no creative release. That creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought, but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort. When the mind realizes that any speculation, any verbalization, any form of thought only gives strength to the 'me', when it sees that as long as the thinker exists apart from thought there must be limitation, the conflict of duality, when the mind realizes that, then it is watchful, everlastingly aware of how it is separating itself from experience, asserting itself, seeking power. In that awareness, if the mind pursues it ever more deeply and extensively without seeking an end, a goal, there comes a state in which the thinker and the thought are one. In that state there is no effort, there is no becoming, there is no desire to change; in that state the 'me' is not, for there is a transformation which is not of the mind.”

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, p.140.

#postmetaphysics

UPDATE barely on topic:

David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, on the embodied mind:

"As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical... We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the "me" that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed." [source]

And Raymond Tallis, scholar and former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University, in response:

"Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at "the neural substrate of which we are composed". This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn." [source] 

I think both of these fellas are correct. Intellectual capacity is a biological phenomenon founded in large part on unconscious functions and processes, while at the same time its higher-order cognitive operations are contextual enactments of distributed properties associated with and expressed through complex networks and communicative activities. A non-reductive materialist framework takes both irreducible capacities and physical embodiment into account when trying to understand mental action. There is no contradition in this regard. Confronting the Real entails thinking matter as matter and not being afraid to limit your speculations accordingly.

ht/dmf

The Himalayas

One of my mentors during my time in academia was a brilliant teacher, anthropologist and Hindu religion scholar who often dazzled us with stories of his diverse travels in Asia. He is an interesting and deeply knowledgeable man. Of his many tales none were more amazing than those dealing with his experiences traveling in and through the Himalayan mountains in Tibet.

Below is a BBC documentary looking at the flora and fauna of the most stunning mountain range in the world, the Himalayas. This 2000 mile mountain range is home to snow leopards, Himalayan wolves, Tibetan bears, and some of the most fascinating life-forms on this planet.

Erin Manning on Relation, Counterpoint and the Nonhuman

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where she is a professor of philosophy and dance. Her publications include Relationscapes (2009), Politics of Touch (2006) and Ephemeral Territories (2003).

Today Manning delivered a lively and thought provoking plenary titled 'Another Regard' at the Nonhuman Turn Conference currently taking place at that University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. I absolutely loved this talk, and I plan on returning to it often this week to ensure I absorb as many of her amazing insights as possible. I hope to post some of the notes I have taken and will be taking if I get a chance. For now I present both the abstract and video of Manning's talk below. Enjoy:

 

Abstract: 

In a recent piece entitled “The Silence Between,” Dawn Prince writes of an encounter with a Bonobo Chimpanzee. Known for her earlier work on gorillas, especially Songs of a Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, Prince already felt a deep connection to gorillas, who, she writes, “regarded her.” In “The Silence Between,” Prince returns to this “regard,” recounting an experience of playing with the Bonobo Kanzi by running along the fence on all fours: “Naturally, I fell into the gorilla language I knew, a language of body, mind, and spirit. Kanzi and I played chase up and down the fence line, both of us on all fours, smiling in a sea of fun and deep breaths.” Then something uncanny occurred: “He stopped suddenly and grabbed his word board off the ground. He pointed to a symbol and then pointed to me and made a hand gesture with his eyebrows raised. It was clear that he was asking me a question. He repeated this series of words and movements over and over, until I said, out loud, "I'm sorry, I can't understand, Kanzi. Let me get Sue and maybe she can help me." At first, she was at a loss. Then after asking him to point to the word again, she realized he was pointing to the word "gorilla" on his board and making the American Sign Language sign for question after pointing to me. It was clear he was asking me if I was a gorilla.” 

This paper takes this occasion as a starting point to rethink the question of regard in terms of Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of concern. Where regard often extrapolates the terms of the encounter from their eventness -- setting the human/animal relation as primary to the event and creating expectations based on the presumed differences between their species -- concern does not take the relation as pre-composed. As Whitehead writes: “The occasion as subject has a ‘concern’ for the object” (1976: 176). This concern “for the object” is not about the already formed but about the affective tonality, the edgings into experience of an occasion’s coming-into-itself. This concern for the event in its concrescence is a regard for what cannot pre-exist it: an affective tonality which will always be singularly tied to this or that occasion. “Concernedness is of the essence of perception” (Whitehead 1967: 180). Concern is never added on to a perception -- it is the very how of perception: “It must be distinctly understood that no prehension even of bare sensa, can be divested of its affective tone, that is to say, of its character of a 'concern'” (Whitehead 1967: 180). 

This notion of concern has deep implications for the rethinking of a field of relations such as that generated in the example above. Rather than departing from a narrative of identity politics (which takes the “human” and the “animal” as given), I will explore how this singular example’s concern for the event in its eventness provokes a emergent fielding (a motif, as von Uexküll would call it) that creates an excess of species (what I call a speciation) that ties in with Whitehead’ work on nature.

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