We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists is a documentary that takes us inside the world of Anonymous, the radical "hacktivist" collective that has redefined civil disobedience for the digital age. The film explores the historical roots of early hacktivist groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater and then follows Anonymous from 4chan to a full-blown movement with a global reach, one of the most transformative of our time.
Development and Evolution in a World Without Labels
by Susan Oyama
Accounts of development and evolution typically involve complementary notions of prespecification–organismic and environmental ‘labeling,’ if you will. In the case of development these can take the form of genetic programs or instructions and the like, while descriptions of evolution often invoke preexisting environmental demands or problems that organisms must meet.
The traditions of thought informing The Embodied Mind and Developmental Systems Theory (DST) both challenge such ways of conceiving life processes. Yet these traditions sprang from different grounds, and they bring distinctive sensibilities to their overlapping projects. I describe the systemic contingencies of self-organizing systems in DST, pointing out the importance of alternative pathways, both in biological processes and the theorizing they inspire.
Enactively Extended Intentionality
by Shaun Gallagher
I argue that the extended mind hypothesis requires an enactive, neo-pragmatic concept of intentionality if it is to develop proper responses to a variety of objections. This enactive concept of intentionality is based on the phenomenological concept of a bodily (or motor or operative) intentionality outlined by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I explore the connections between this concept and recent embodied approaches to social cognition.
"We are always constrained by the path we have laid down, but there is no ultimate ground to prescribe the steps that we take ... This groundlessness of laying down a path in walking is the key philosophical issue that remains to be addressed".
- Varela, Thompson, Rosch (1991), The Embodied Mind.
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This image comes from a very deep Chandra observation of the Tycho supernova
remnant. Low-energy X-rays (red) in the image show expanding debris from the supernova explosion and high energy X-rays (blue) show the blast wave, a shell of extremely energetic electrons. These high-energy X-rays show a pattern of X-ray "stripes" never previously seen in a supernova remnant. |
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory spacecraft detected a suprisingly regular pattern of X-rays in a well-known supernova remnant called Tycho. The new observations provide the first direct evidence that a cosmic event can rocket particles to energies 100 times higher than those achieved by Earth's most powerful accelerators, researchers said. The discovery of X-ray "stripes" in the remains of an exploded star may help astronomers learn how some of the highest-energy particles in our galaxy reach their incredible speeds, a new study suggests. The find may also help scientists figure out how some of those super-speedy particles — which are known as cosmic rays, and constantly bombard Earth— are produced, they added. "We’ve seen lots of intriguing structures in supernova remnants, but we’ve never seen stripes before," said study leader Kristoffer Eriksen of Rutgers University in a statement. "This made us think very hard about what’s happening in the blast wave of this powerful explosion."
ON HISTORY - Pakistani writer and filmmaker TARIQ ALI and film director OLIVER STONE will continue their ongoing discourse about "forgotten--or deliberately buried--episodes" from American history from the US intervention against the Russian Revolution to the ongoing interference of the United States in Pakistani political affairs. In their recent public dialogue, On History, Oliver Stone asks, according to Jon Wiener, "smart questions about the rise and fall of the United States and its empire in the 20th century." In this conversation, the tables are turned as we ask Tariq Ali to kick off with some questions for Oliver Stone, leading into a conversation between them on politics, film, and the untold history of the nation.
Adam Robbert has a new post up (here) responding to Levi Bryant’s recent comments (here) on the differences between Bryant’s onticology and Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy.Although I share Adam’s view that epistemic activities are generated within distributed networks (ecologies) of media and materials, I am still left wondering what justifies the claim that such activities “share the same ontological qualities” as rocks? Epistemic events are enactions involving very different substances and relations than, say, a fireplace ‘event’, as an assemblage of rocks. The properties and qualities which go into these two events, and the emergent conditions they each enact are very different in kind and effect in ways that make all the difference.“[K]nowledge (or epistemes in this case) are embodied in specific media (e.g., brains, books, and bytes), are not “other than” those media and, in this way, also share the same ontological qualities as ‘physical’ interactions between, say, tornados and barn doors.” [source]
I’m not sure I follow the logic here? Cognitive ecosystems can be considered Real in the same sense as “other ecosystems”, but not in the same “way”. In fact, I would reframe all of this by suggesting, rather, that epistemic activities are features of the very same ecosystems as other entities and assemblages but they embody very distinct properties. Thus animal cognition is generated out of the same ecological circumstances as photosynthesis but the enaction of human cognitive events includes the emergence of imaginal representation in addition to physical processes. Epistemic relations and activities (as emergent capacities) are as Real as other purely physical relations and activities, but not in the same way because each set of activities have intrinsic onto-specific organizations, associations and properties."Object-oriented philosophy’s account of withdrawal holds true for both ontological and epistemological domains, where the ontic and the epistemic can be distinguished analytically to perform certain philosophical tasks, but are ultimately integrated in the embodiment of beings such that epistemic and cognitive ecosystems are ontologically real in the same way that other ecosystems are." [source]
How can objects sometimes be vibrant things with an effective presence independent of the words, images, and feelings they may provoke in humans? This question is posed by Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of "Thingness," the nature of matter. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center's programs will focus on the material conditions of our lives. Jane Bennet is a professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. In her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010), she asks how our politics might approach public concerns were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things but the things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects and manifest traces of independence and vitality? Following the tangled threads that link vibrant materialities, human selves, and the "agentic assemblages" they form, Bennett examines what hoarders, people who are preternaturally attuned to "things," can teach us about the agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff. Professor Bennet is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman's materialism.
"The Pirahã are supremely gifted in all the ways necessary to ensure their continued survival in the jungle: they know the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area; they understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid them; and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game."Members of the Pirahã can whistle their language, which is how the tribe's men communicate when hunting in the jungle.
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| nano-image of animal protein |
“Agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices-interative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations- through the dynamics of intra-activity.” (Barad, 2007, p.178).
“[T]he core of existence lies in activity. Existence as activity enjoys both an epistemological and ontological priority. Epistemologically, it is only through the acts of a thing that we can ever come to know the being of a thing. Ontologically it is only through the acts of a thing that a thing endures. In both cases, however, it cannot be said that objects are static or unchanging things. To be is to act and to act is to move and change.” [source]
I relate all this to what I have said previously [here]: every assemblage or object is a “material-affective substantiality with capacities unique to its individual existence. Such inherent substantial capacities are precisely what I call potency. And it is this general potency of existing entities which theorists refer to when they talk about a thing’s ‘agency’.”“Objects don’t act. To say that objects act would be to say that there is something, objects, that either act or do not act. But if there is no doer behind or underneath the deed, then we must say rather that objects are acts. The substantiality of substance is the substance’s activity. Likewise, we cannot suggest that substances or objects are products of becomings… because the substantiality of a substance is not a product or outcome of becomings or activities, but rather the substances are their activity. There isn’t first one thing, becomings or activities, and then another thing, objects that are the result of these activities. There is just the one thing, these activities, that is the substantiality of the substance. The idea that the objecthood of a substance is a product of a becoming that precedes it is premised on an arbitrary and subjective cessation of activity on the part of one who observes a substance that is not itself reflected in nature. Rather, when activity ceases so too does substance cease.” [source]
The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and CommunicationBy François Laruelle“Non-philosophy hinges on a rejection of what Laruelle calls the philosophical decision. To engage in the philosophical decision is to endorse the position that anything and everything is a candidate for philosophical reflection. Thus to do philosophy means to reflect on the world, and likewise if one is being philosophical, one is necessarily being reflective or meta-philosophical. Non-philosophy means simply to refuse such a decision. In other words non-philosophy refuses to reflect on things. Instead non-philosophy withdraws from the decision, and in doing so enters into a space of what Laruelle calls science. As John Mullarkey describes it, Laruelle is “abstaining from philosophy as such while simultaneously taking it as its own raw material.” - Alexander R. GallowayThe unitary or dominant way of thinking is that of a generalized hermeneutics, a hermeto-logy. The economy of hermetology and its most general structure are both those of a “difference.” Hermeto-logical Difference is the indissoluble correlation, the undecidable coupling of truth and its communication. It postulates that truth needs meaning, that meaning and presence—as differentiated and sought after as they may be—belong to the essence of truth, that the secret and the logos, the secret and its manifestation are reciprocally necessary and are mutually determined.
The hermeto-logical circle is deeper and more original than the “hermeneutic circle.” Hermeto-logical Difference is a fundamental invariant, a matrix for what is called “metaphysics” in general. It is more powerful than its modalities or avatars, among which the hermeneutic conflict of interpretations, as well as the textual and signifying critique within hermeneutics, and all possible theories of communication. The conflict between Being and Dasein, between truth and the meaning of Being is itself one of the modalities of a more general conflict, that between the secret—the supposed secret—and logos. Hermeto-logical Difference programs, predraws, and teleologically orders all its modalities. It is their internal and external boundary, continually redrawn.
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| Peter Paul Rubens, Mercury and a Sleeping Herdsman |
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved…
the ones who never yawn
or say a commonplace thing,
but burn, burn, burn,
like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars.”
~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road
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