Bernstein on Pragmatism and Philosophical Horizons

Richard J. Bernstein was the 2013 Selzer Visiting Philosopher and gave a lecture on "The Pragmatic Turn" (also see his 2010 book by the same name) on Feb. 13, 2013 at Beloit College. In it he argued that many philosophical themes, both continental and analytic, from the past 150 years are derived from classical American pragmatists. Enjoy:

Ecological Politics Beyond Moralism?

The more I encounter Leftist political ecology the more I realize the ubiquity of cognitive biases prioritizing the human. So often such anthropocentrism operates via a deep conceptual and emotive coding for an anesthetizing moralistic frame.

If we genuinely seek to enact ecologies of sufficient practice for human and nonhuman nonzero flourishing it may be required to drastically reduce the intensity of certain cherished humanistic assumptions regarding design-as-politics. For example, hypersensitivity to self-ascribed cultural essentialism may de facto block required but admittedly radical public interventions into existing socio-economic habits and structural relations.

Yet, generating ecologically sufficient practice may mean making very hard choices that may not preserve locally desired or fetishized modes of living and generate much tension and conflict. Traditionally this clash between supposed necessity and self-conservation that seems inherent in complex animal social systems directed such tensions into the activity of war. But if we are going to develop radically divergent and ethical futures that are noncompliant with the thanatologics of capitalism and/or war we are going to need to reframe the context of our deliberative focus and pragmatic actions.

It seems more and more to be the case that we need to intelligently (re)design and (re)build processes of deliberation and negotiated prioritization within technical, expert and citizenry spheres (in everything from personal conversation to academics, media and official institutions) in order to diffuse conflicting tensions as they arise and channel them in ways that allow us to better utilize productive differences for enacting social innovation. Anthropocentric moralism – with all its documented anthropocenities – will never be a substitute for an ecologistics of sensitive negotiation between modes of existence indexed against different scales of complexity ranging from the subatomic to the existentially charged social experiential.

What I seek as an alternative to the self-justifying anthropocentric politics of the contemporary is a cosmopolitics of intelligent design that acknowledges and skillfully adapts to the functional imperatives of complex biosocial niches without over-prioritizing the ideologically coded and arranged/deranged desires of humans at the expense of entire ecosystems.

Nietzsche on 'the will to life'

Entangled materiality as potency - without the awkward vitalisms of previous discarded attempts at explanation. An inherent potency as relentless as it is undefinable..

  “Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian … Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.” – Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Where does power come from? It congregates, co-habituates, coagulates, and reverberates via the expressive modes of existing assemblages as they express their structural relation. Affect writ large, and distributed according to whatever field of possibilities it negotiates in the making of bodies without limits other than those set out in the generative dynamics (historicity) involved in each and every specific ontic composition. To affirm the will to life is simply to acknowledge the facticity and potency of existence however ex nihilo it may seem from within.

Organic Intellectualism among the Working Class?

McKenzie Wark on salvage philosophy from his newly published Molecular Red (2015):

In his book The Philosophy of Living Experience Bogdanov is not really trying to write philosophy so much as to hack it, to repurpose it for something other than the making of more philosophy. Philosophy is no longer an end in itself, but a kind of raw material for the design and organizing, not quite of what Foucault called discourses of power/knowledge, but more of practices of laboring/knowing. The projected audience for this writing is not philosophers so much as the organic intellectuals of the working class, exactly the kind of people Bogdanov’s activities as an educator-activist had always addressed. Having clearly read his Nietzsche, Bogdanov’s decision is that if one is to philosophize with a hammer, then this is best done, not with professional philosophers, but with professional hammerers.

To write and speak and work for those that might ignite their own passions towards revolutions in lifestyle and polity..? What a fantastic idea. But are there those willing to read, hear and work with us among the precariat classes and marginal peoples? The "hammerers" I know are more interested in getting more vacation time and keeping their lousy jobs than struggling against authorities or sparking an "organic" uprising. Capitalist realism runs deep as the masses sooth themselves in entertainment and major to minor intoxicants.

Wark thinks the "labor perspective" is a point of leverage, but I'm not so sure.

Addressing the Anthropocene is not something to leave in the hands of those in charge, given just how badly the ruling class of our time has mishandled this end of prehistory, this firstly scientific and now belatedly cultural discovery that we all live in a biosphere in a state of advanced metabolic rift. The challenge then is to construct the labor perspective on the historical tasks of our time. What would it mean to see historical tasks from the point of view of working people of all kinds? How can everyday experiences, technical hacks and even utopian speculations combine in a common cause, where each is a check on certain tendencies of the other?  

Technical knowledge checks the popular sentiment toward purely romantic visions of a world of harmony and butterflies—as if that was a viable plan for seven billion people. Folk knowledge from everyday experience checks the tendency of technical knowledge to imagine sweeping plans without thought for the particular consequences—like diverting the waters of the Aral Sea. Utopian speculations are that secret heliotropism which orients action and invention toward a sun now regarded with more caution and respect than it once was. There is no other world, but it can’t be this one

on clear and present morality

In “Their Morals and Ours”, Leon Trotsky laid out some sobering reflections on justification and sentiment:

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man [sic] over nature and to the abolition of the power of man [sic] over man [sic]…  

Morality is one of the ideological functions in this struggle. The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality. It pursues the idea of the “greatest possible happiness” not for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality. The mixing of this cement constitutes the profession of the petty-bourgeois theoreticians, and moralists. They dabble in all colors of the rainbow but in the final instance remain apostles of slavery and submission.

The dabbling and application of moral sentiments is the emotive’s approach to ethical deliberation and action. Without clear and present investigation - critical as well as syncretic - we humans become slaves to the dominant ideologies (as infomatic regimes) infusing current institutions of extraction and alienation.

And for what? For whom? Know your enemy, both within and beyond.

HENRi

Yet another fantastic speculative ontography of sentience:

“HENRi is an emotionally powerful short film, which explores human existence at the most fundamental, personal level—what it means to be a conscious individual. 

Hundreds of years in the future, a derelict spacecraft, controlled and powered by a human brain, floats aimlessly in the outer reaches of space. HENRI, the name of the ship's power system, is an acronym which stands for Hybrid Electronic / Neuron Responsive Intelligence, and was the first of Earth’s Neuro-Tech space exploration research vessels. Trapped in the cold, mechanical prison of the vessel, the “brain,” which has no recollection or concept of self, gradually begins to experience disjointed images of its former life—images it cannot understand. Carrying the remains of a crew long dead, and becoming increasingly self-aware, HENRI experiences the instinctual desire to be free. Yearning for freedom and yet unable to move, the brain devises a plan to build itself a mechanical body from parts of the ship. Maybe then it will understand the images it is seeing—maybe then it will feel alive.”

Written and Directed by Eli Sasich, produced by Jefferson Richard and Dominic Fratto, and starring Keir Dullea and Margot Kidder.

Learn more: HERE

The Transcendental Positionality of Experience?

[ please note: this is only a draft fragment of a work-in-progress]

Part 1 / Transcendental Positionality [0]

Žižek is correct about the formal structure of the “I am” in the intelligibility of the universe. Without situated experience there can be no formal appeal to the Other, and no logical grounds upon which we can say that we know anything at all. Awareness is always already situated: a perception from a particular position within a terrain of possible perspectives. That is, the “transcendental subject” cannot be explained away without giving up all claims to knowledge.

1.1 - Framing the Transcendental

Transcendental philosophy includes approaches that describe the fundamental structures of being, not as an ontology (which is a description or theory of being and its forms), but as the framework of validation of the very knowledge of being - what Immanuel Kant argued as the conditions of possibility for human knowledge. In seeking the transcendental conditions of knowledge previous to (a priori) any experience traditional metaphysics is converted to epistemology. Through such framings transcendentalism prioritizes the conception of being (thought) over the presence of beings (world) which describing experience.  

1.2 - Maintaining the Transcendental in the Empirical

Why must the transcendental positionality of experience be an ontologically distinct “subject” at all? Is it not the empirical case that our locus of awareness is an 'objective' cognizing body? In fact, the embodied cognitive action of sapient material assemblages can be indexed directly to the "phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh" while maintaining arguments for the transcendental positionality of experience. Despite the phantasmal extension of phenomenological awareness and experience via synthetic symbolic association and projection the empirical subject is the locus of perception out of sensation.

From Joseph Carew:

“Although phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and more recently Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion argue for the primordial unity of consciousness and the lived body or the self's immanent auto-determination from the unfolding of givenness of the flesh (which indicates the disappearance of a radical subject-object distinction by the interpenetration of both in embodiment), Žižek makes the claim that such descriptions are intrinsically lacking insofar as they fail to take account of the experience of the monstrous and the traumatic irrevocably tied to the essence of human being. One cannot merely replace classical subjectivity with a more organic theory of experience that intertwines consciousness with a phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh…

Arguing against postmodern theorists like Derrida and Foucault, who claim that the subject itself is merely an empty, accidental construction that arises out of the flux of historical experience, Žižek contends that by forgetting the ontological schism between mind and body that enables the self to be determined according to linguistic and political forces in the first place, they lose sight of the very formal structure of the I that is required even to speak of the endless temporal variations of selfhood within the contingent upsurge of sociocultural activity. The unceasing play of cultural difference, the non-finite proliferation of identities and discourses, can only be adequately understood through the transcendental framework offered by Cartesian subjectivity because, as that which prevents human activity from being explicable through solely natural or biological grounds, it supplies the formal-universal structure through which such change is rendered possible. [source]

Žižek and others are correct: individuality must be accounted for and reckoned - as our creaturely capacity for differentiating awareness is a 'transcendental' feature of intelligibility. However, there are so many different ways we can frame and understand how such an awareness can be achieved, and the most credible among them do not involve Descartes and Žižek's massive errors.

From actualizing the Cartesian fantasy of an “ontological schism” between experience and physicality, or mind and body, knowing hominid bodies enact degrees of operational individuality, or "agency", via the emergent operational capacities of neurologically instantiated experience and complex gross materiality via a system of combinatorial auto-affective expression - or what we can refer to as empirical existenz. The objective matrix of human existenz is thus an immanent achievement of a capacity for positional awareness (sentience) and elaborate cognition (sapience) organically generated by an dynamic ecology of potent assemblages and flows.

Catastrophia?

To embrace change and entropy, and to know and feel the ubiquity of ontological vulnerability, is to fall in love again and again with Real – that dark, fleshy, ungrounded ground of wilderness teeming within and without, unbound. To love the Real is to acknowledge and respect the potency of things and flows which perpetually deconstruct our words and thoughts, forcing us to confront the catastrophic tendency at the core of all being. To live is to die. And only when we learn to love and embrace that pulsating darkness at the core of material existence without truly knowing it can we gain intimacy in the world.

From Arran James:

“[C]atastrophic thought… an obsession with the wound and the ruin, the collapsing and the ecstatic, the obscene figures of human and nonhuman suffering, the withdrawn core of things concieved of as the thing in itself that doesn’t simply remain hidden but which actively resists actualisation. The end of the world as it’s apotheosis.” [source]

“[O]bliterated sculpture, wastelands, abandoned and decaying spaces, deserts- an aesthetic of urban collapse; depressions, schziophrenia, epidemics of anxiety and panic being produced by the excessive demands of capitalism’s infosphere, the post-traumatic subjectivity that becomes hegemonic in these last days of capital’s reign- the neuropsychological collapse of eviscerated minds; the Inevitable, both proximate and distal in the forms of the perishing of the individual organism in human death and in considerations of entropy, heat-death of the universe, and ecological catastophe- the intimate and cosmic levels of material collapse.” [source]

“[C]osmological time, which subsumes geological, evolutionary and historical temporalities within its manifold, is nothing but the working out of the original Catastrophe of Creation. The something that followed the nothing is only a symptom of the disturbance of nothing and its (anthropocentrically) slow return to itself.” [source]

This is just a sketch of a concept that signals the cognitive easing of traumas associated with gathering awareness of finitude. To be continued... 

Relative Universalism?

Who owns nature? International policies for the protection of the Environment rest on a very specific conception of nature, which appeared in Europe during the Enlightenment. This conception is far from being shared by all the peoples of the earth, who value different cosmological principles. According to Philippe Descola, the preservation of biodiversity can only become fully effective if it takes into account this plurality in the understanding of nature.

Here is a lengthy quote from Philippe Descola’s “Who owns nature?” (2008):

[M]odern universalism flows directly from naturalist ontology, based as it is on the principle that beyond the muddle of particularisms endlessly churned out by humans, there exists a field of truths reassuringly regular, knowable via tried and trusted methods, and reducible to immanent laws the exactness of which is beyond blight from their discovery process. In short, cultural relativism is only tolerable, indeed interesting to study, in that it stands against the overwhelming background of a natural universalism where truth seekers can seek refuge and solace. Mores, customs, ethos vary but the mechanisms of carbon chemistry, gravitation and DNA are identical for all. The universalism of international institutions implementing nature protection policies springs from extending these general principles, originally applied to the physical world alone, to the realm of human values. It relies in particular on the idea that the Moderns alone would have availed themselves of a privileged access to a true intelligence of nature whilst other cultures would have arrived at mere representations – crude but worthy of interest, according to those charitably inclined, false and pernicious by their contaminating capacity for the positivists. This epistemological model, which Bruno Latour has called ‘particular universalism’ [7], entails therefore inevitably that nature protection principles be imposed to all the non-moderns who were not in a position to acquire a clear grasp of their necessity for want of adopting a thinking pattern like ours, and more particularly for having failed to imagine that nature existed as a sphere independent from humanity. You lived once in symbiosis with nature, Amazonian Indians are told, but now, you have chain saws and we must teach you to leave alone your forests become world heritage on grounds of their high rate of biodiversity.  

How are we to make that universalism a bit less imperial without renouncing in the process the biodiversity which enables us to preserve the world’s dazzling splendour? One possible avenue, the twists and turns of which I have begun exploring elsewhere would be what could be called a relative universalism, with relative as in “relative pronoun”, that is making a connection. Relative universalism does not stem from nature and cultures, substances and spirits, discrimination between prime and second essences, but relationships of continuity and discontinuity, of identity and differences, of likeness and unlikeness which humans establish everywhere between existing beings by means of tools inherited from phylogenesis: one body, one intentionality, one aptitude to discern distinctive gaps, the ability to establish with any other relations of closeness or enmity, of domination or dependence, exchange or appropriation, subjectivation or objectivation. Relative universalism does not demand prior equal materiality for all, and contingent meanings, it is content to recognize the irruption of discontinuity, in things like in the mechanisms to grasp them and to admit that there are only a restricted number of formulae suited to their best use, either by endorsing a phenomenal discontinuity or by invalidating it within a continuity.  

However, if relative universalism is to lead to an ethos, that is to rules for world use to which everyone could subscribe without denying anyone the values of their upbringing, this ethos has yet to be built stone after stone, indeed connection after connection. The task is not beyond us. It supposes a grand stock taking of inter-human connections and of those between humans and non-humans and an agreement to banish those which give rise to general opprobrium. It is more than conceivable that the most extreme forms of inequality would come under this heading, such as the gratuitous taking of life, the objectification of beings endowed with sensible faculties or the standardization of lifestyles and behaviours. And as, because of the consensus needed to arrive at the selection of the connections retained, none of them could be deemed superior to another, the values attached to practices, knowledge and wisdoms or singular sites could rest on the connections they bring out in the specific context of their use, without slipping into contingent justifications or narrow interest calculations in the process. For instance, resuming the protection of nature argument: where humans consider it normal and desirable to engage in intersubjective relationships with non-humans, it would be conceivable to legitimate the preservation of a particular environment not in virtue of its inherent ecosystemic features but of the fact that animals there are treated as persons by the local populations – truth to say, usually hunted, but subject to ritual precautions. This would give a category of protected zones broadly operating on an ‘animist model’ – in the Amazon basin, Canada, Siberia or the malaysian forest. This would not preclude the adjunction of justifications based on the naturalist type of connection – e.g. biodiversity optimisation or carbon capture – in so far as the second type of connections, those favoured by remote actors did not excessively undermine the conditions in which the local actors exercise the type of connection they have set up. It is pretty clear that the connections presiding over the registration of Mont Saint Michel of the Banaue rice terraces as World heritage sites would be quite different: no longer the presence of non-humans seen as subjects, but the materialisation of a project connecting macrocosm and microcosm, the traces of which can only be found in analogic civilisations wherever they flourished. One might say that this is in the realm of Utopia: undoubtedly, if Utopia is understood in its better sense of a multiplicity of virtual futures opening the possibility for solutions not hitherto considered.

All this considered, this is exactly the kind of approach we need when navigating the problem sets established by the tensions between ontography as praxis and pluralism as politics..

The Metaphysics of Meaning - Part 1

In a recent post I challenged Adam Robbert to elucidate his use of the language of conceptuality, and to make explicit his understanding of the ontological status of concepts. Adam's response was, as usual, thoughtful and concise. In his response to a commenter on that exchange Adam asked a question I think gets right to the core of our discussion:

"From your view, then, are there anything like propositional statements?"

My response is as follows:

First, that human animals can make ‘propositional statements’ is uncontroversial. Humans are capable of all kinds of expressions. What is at stake here is how propositional statements come into being and whether or not they have a relatively autonomous existence beyond the interplay between neurological functioning and physical coding in texts, images and so on. The only requirements for statement-making are bodies capable of memory, recursion, articulation and mimesis, as well as the existence of socialized natural language (as learned reference and gestural flexibility) and a community of interlocutors.  Until those statements become marks on a page or sound recordings (thus coded) there is nothing about making such statements that suggests the relatively autonomous existence of an object that can be called a ‘concept’.

Interactions between perceptive-sapient bodies and ambient information affordances unfold according to the skillful difference navigation and mediation (as you say) by bodies/assemblages phylogenetically and ontogenetically oriented towards coping-with-in complex causal and information rich environments. And this embodied communicative dance between complex expressive and/or potent entities conditions, but does determine, our active and reactive coping responses within particular ecologies via the formation of information rich brain patterns/habits instantiated in relation to prior and ongoing exposures to socially instituted references and speech-acts. Sapient-bodies generate, store and recall a range of neural-semantic associations that are communicable – and thus available to be captured in codes, text, images, etc. – between sapient bodies, therein receiving feedback and varying degrees of intensive expression and reciprocal activations and reactivations, in ways that coordinate subsequent thetic brain patterns (“understandings”) and behaviors.

Again, cognizing bodies (things A) are endowed with particular capacities and acquired brain habits. These bodies communicate with each other via natural language and personal memory/recall in relation to socially circulated semiotic tokens (things B) such as writing, images, materials, etc. The communicative (gestural, verbal, symbol-deploying, material) dance between things A and B generates informational complexity, and thus “meaning’ via consequential expression, expectation and response. There is nothing about communicative encounters that requires us to posit ghostly mediating entities (things C) such as ‘ideas’ or ‘concepts’. Semiosis is something that happens between material objects (things A and things B) within niches of differential assembly and potencies – affording various time-space possibilities (cf. Heidegger’s ‘clearings’).

In this onto-story, then, ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ are not autonomous entities circulating among humans and media, but words (nouns) created to describe and ultimately misrepresent enacted and consequential, and therefore “meaningful” relationships between bodies and semiotic tokens and media within situations (ecologies). And mistaking the semantic/informational aspects of the enactive realities these relations generate and maintain for relatively independent objects sets up what I believe to be a damaging onto-theology of transcendental meaning.

Herein we could enter into a discussion about the importance of a nihilistic (re)turn to primordial affection and the subsequent deflation of doxic thought, but perhaps this is not the appropriate context for that discussion. I will only suggest here that what drives the most sophisticated forms of nihilism - and thus post-nihilist thought - is realization that only relations and materials exist, and that semantically laden embodied experience is an emergent capacity and epiphenomenal expression – albeit phenomenologically rich and existentially significant.

I think the core issue I have with Adam’s model is the way he (and almost every other intellectual I know) reifies the relational patterns that obtain between brains, media, and/or social objects (i.e., texts) as things-in-themselves. As ontographers I think we need to be more rigorous, precise and clear when distinguishing between assemblages, relations, processes, and flows. Our historical linguistic practices and semantic habits no longer work. We have an awkward and kludged semantic heritage that has become, in large parts, obsolete in the context we now seek to exist with-in. So we need to jettison certain aspects of existing semantic infrastructures and fashion (salvage and design) new semiotic compositions – if only because we need to adapt better to reality and design healthier niches. And thinking about and using words like ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ as objects is part of the rotted superstructure of reference and metaphysics I see as problematic.

the revolution will be commercialized

by Jeff S-L (Az)

Are concepts a substance?

Continuing his project of critically integrating ecology, media studies and the enactive paradigm in cognitive science Adam offers the following gem (by way of an abstract for an in-progress paper):

"I suggest that human experience and behavior is an ongoing and distributed activity achieved at the intersection of conceptual knowledge, physical perception, and environmental affordance. But what is knowledge? What is a concept? How do they participate in larger ecologies? To understand how knowledge participates in human action, I propose that knowledge is a skill waiting to be acquired. It is an attunement to new contrasts made possible by the coordination of multiple species, practices, and technologies. Similarly, I define conceptualization as a speculative capacity, a performance of the body that leaps the subject beyond immediacy into the spaces of possibility afforded by the present. Stated differently, knowledge represents the acquisition of a conceptual faculty, an ability to mediate difference and contrast in the environment in a meaningful way. One way to visualize this intersection is to underscore that ecology entangles perception with cognitive activity through the enaction of experience. The intersection of concept with sense, then, is the basis for the ecological understanding of knowledge" (Adam Robbert). 

[Image: Nunzio Paci]

I can dig that. Intersectionality, affordance, distributed activities, and knowledge as embodied skill and attunement. Exactly that.  What I still can't understand is what conceptuality actually is in Adam's model? Is a ‘concept’ a linguistic unit (node) attached to a set or chain of other linguistic units (in a network), or is it the internal neurological pattern instantiated in the central nervous system as it relates to those external tokens? Or both in some sort of semiotic reciprocal influence?

I think it is important for a materialist/realist ecological ontography to be able to specific how conceptuality works by locating the components of its assembly, and thus conceptualize the unit operations or individuated 'thingliness' that we call concepts or idea.

UPDATE (Feb 21, 2015):

In response Adam comments:

This is clearly the key question for me, Michael (at least in terms of the above issues). And the short answer is "all of the above"; that is, we can't think of a concept as cleanly residing in language or in linguistic tokens, which need an interpreter, nor inside a neurological pattern, since whatever such a "pattern" is must necessarily be extended outwards and entangled with the environment. So, on the one hand, concepts are relational and dynamic capacities of a body engaged in his or her environment (we should say something about affects and somatics here, too, but one thing at a time). On the other, the content of the concept can be learned through teaching, practice, and engagement with the available media ecologies and thus integrated into the action of the body (though not without transforming that body in the process and never in the same way for all bodies).  

Take for example this comment by Evan Thompson in his recent Tricycle interview (D and I have been going back and forth on these issues for several weeks, so maybe he'll chime in here too):  

"Experience and concepts are interdependent. Whether there are nonconceptual modes of experience is a complicated matter that both Buddhist and Western philosophers have argued about a lot. But in most cases of human experience you can’t have one without the other. Take science. Here you observe things, of course, but you can’t see them properly unless you have the right concepts. If you just look through a microscope with no guidance on how to look at what you see, you have no clue what you’re looking at. Even if you’re doing high school biology, you need to have concepts like “cell wall” or “organelle”—to say nothing of what’s happening at the edge of scientific discovery, where you’re using new imaging technologies and learning to see things. So observation is happening there, of course. But also a lot of conceptualizing." [source]

What I like about this quote is that it gets at the interdependence of experience and concepts, or sensation and knowledge, in a way that also implies that knowledge has to circulate and become available in a certain way for people to obtain certain skills of action and perception. So there's a sense in which there is a representational dimension to concepts, insofar as distinctions and contrasts are identified and represented in a medium, and an enactive or non-representational one, insofar as knowledge really only exists through the actions of knowers. They stand as different stages of the ecology of learning—the former as the unlearned skill obtained from the available ecology of knowledge that needs to be thought through, step-by-step in consciousness, and the latter as the internalized capacity for action in part made possible by conceptual acquisition.  

So, I don't think I'm at the point of getting to a nice, one-line definition of a concept yet—and there may not be one—but that's how I'm thinking about it at the moment.

I will have more to say on all that shortly.

The Anthropocentrist Loop?

One of the core motivations in peddling a postnihilist rhetorics (as praxis) is an interest in disrupting the cognitive hegemony of anthropocentric thought. Meaning and rationalizations are local human expressions, not constituent features woven into the fabric of the cosmos. Yet, all human action seems to be routed through self-referential circuits of existential concern and human-focused interest. Inflated egos everywhere – with only a hint of the kind of perspective-taking required to speculate about what it might ‘be like’ to be an otter, or an orchid.

More significantly, anthropocentrism narrows the associative cognitive-neuronal tunnel within which we can evaluate the overall necessity, function and agency of otters, orchids, or even carbon-dioxide molecules. This makes for bad ontography and therefore even worse social design. Thus deflating the aspirations of folk transcendentalisms inherent in the cultural codes of Western thinkers, viz. a perpetual negation of its doxic contents, can make room for new circuits of evaluation and habits of communication wherein humans interface and relate with nonhumans in a more authentic and ecologically tenable way.

http://hontor.deviantart.com/art/Anthropocentrism-136154462

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“There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.” ― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? 

“In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.” ― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

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Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most significant species on the planet (in the sense that they are considered to have a moral status or value higher than that of other animals), or the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective. The term can refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism.

Facticity_Prime

So much philosophical intelligence hinges on comprehending the inescapable reality of facticity as disclosed via phenomenological encounter. Being is prior to knowing, and our corporeal relations with-in the world afford a primordial condition for ontological intimacy. Thus, we are always already at home in the universe.

The term is first used by German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and has a variety of meanings. It can refer to facts and factuality, as in nineteenth-century positivism, but comes to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation in Wilhelm Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism. The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with ideality, as does Jürgen Habermas in Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung).

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) discusses facticity as the "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which is to say we are "thrown into the world." By this, he is not only referring to a brute fact, or the factuality of a concrete historical situation, e.g., "born in the '80s." Facticity is something that already informs and has been taken up in existence, even if it is unnoticed or left unattended. As such, facticity is not something we come across and directly behold. In moods, for example, facticity has an enigmatic appearance, which involves both turning toward and away from it. For Heidegger, moods are conditions of thinking and willing to which they must in some way respond. The thrownness of human existence (or Dasein) is accordingly disclosed through moods. [wikipedia]

We are well past the point where a shift in frames necessitates discussion about the ecology of know-ing, rather than the supposed solidity of know-ledge. Human knowing is a material and ecological process generated within particular structural and expressive matrices - never fully consumated nor completely detached from the facticity of its activities. Both 'matters of fact' (factuality) and 'matterns of concern' (Latour) are rooted in facticity. It is corporeal intra-action all the way down..

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Dasein is always marked by facticity. It does not exist as an independent thing hovering in a void, but always finds itself in a particular situation with highly specific possibilities. For the most part, this facticity does not take the form of knowledge. Too many philosophers have constructed their model of human being by imagining humans as entities that know the world. Heidegger sees that knowing is only a rare special case of the way that we deal with our environment… Knowledge is not primary, because it arises from out of the world. Dasein somehow has to rise above its usual interaction with the world in order to gain anything resembling knowledge. Dasein and world are bound together closely from the start. If this seems to eliminate the traditional problem in philosophy of how human beings can know a world lying outside of them, then so much the better. For Heidegger as for Husserl, this is a false problem that never should have existed in the first place. (Harman, Heidegger Explained, 2007:62 )

“The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of idealizations or of things said.” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p.94)

the ecological a priori?

Adam Robbert bringing the Foucault and Deleuze eco-style: 

For Foucault, then, the nonhuman impresses itself onto anthropic space through the production of laws and regulations, the production of material infrastructures that manipulate human behavior and perception, and the enforcement of practices that condition human beings. In Foucault’s understanding, the human is always born into a larger historical condition that is not of the same kind as any one person’s individual experience, an experience that is, to an indeterminate degree, an effect of historical trends rather a starting point for historical evaluation. 

Similarly, for Deleuze, nonhuman forces already act on the inside of human experience. Here all knowing is an inter-species effort; multiple species are always on the inside of anthropomorphic space, undermining it from within. The Kantian transcendental subject is for Deleuze a complex and multiple collective of diverging syntheses of cognition and perception. If Foucault initiates a move from the transcendental a priori to the historical a priori then Deleuze initiates a similar movement—from an historical a priori to an ecological a priori. Crucially, the enfolding of divergent species into human cognition marks not just an ecological basis for all human thought—a mark that suggests that all human thought is dependent on a multiplicity of nonhumans living and dying on the inside of human subjectivity—but more cosmically that human cognition is a higher dimensional enfolding of spacetime itself, a synthesis that makes the vastness of the cosmos thinkable to the human mind.

What I like about Adam's framing of F & D here is his seemless demonstration of how each of these Frenchies are already thinking ecologically in their appeals to structure and materiality, without having explicitly stated as such. Reading Adam's post (here) reminds me exactly why the work of these two gents is so near and dear to me: each attempts to think about the structural dynamics embodied in material relations of power, subjectivity and episteme in an ecological manner.

I cannot stress enough how important it seems to me to find ways of operationalizing the insight that nonhuman forces always already act on the "inside" of human experience, as the non-human-in-human - the dark flesh conditioning and positioning hominid experience. Experiencing bodies are complex multiplicities of synthesizing assemblage - higher dimensional enfoldings of space-time...

"[M]an and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other – not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 4-5).

nKnK

"To say, with Rousseau, that we do not know what our nature permits us to be, is to say that our status as natural beings underdetermines our status as normative beings—in other words, that “our nature” does not answer the question of what it means to be a human being, or dictate what it is that we should become. This is somewhat reassuring since it tells us that there is a domain of human freedom not dictated by our biological nature, but it is somewhat unnerving because it leaves uncomfortably open what kind of beings human beings could become." (Kompridis 2009:20)

NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS Nikolas Kompridis

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Nikolas Kompridis is a Canadian born philosopher and political theorist contaminated by the the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (having worked closely with influential academic Jürgen Habermas), romanticism and the aesthetic dimension(s) of politics. His writing re-works the concepts of receptivity and Heidegger's 'world disclosure' into a minor paradigm he calls "reflective disclosure". He is currently a Research Professor and Director of the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University.

In Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (2006), Kompridis argues that Habermasian critical theory has largely severed its own roots in German Idealism, while neglecting modernity's distinctive relationship to the utopian potential of critique. In the book, Kompridis draws upon Habermas' work, along with the philosophical traditions of German Idealism, American Pragmatism, and many others to propose an alternative approach to social criticism as a facilitator of social change. Arguing against Habermas' "procedural conception of reason" and in favour of reflective disclosure, the book suggests that critical theory should become a "possibility-disclosing" practice of social criticism "if it is to have a future worthy of its past."

His publications include:

• The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (ed.) 2014. New York, London: Bloomsbury.
• "Technology's Challenge to Democracy: What of theHuman?" Parrhesia, Issue 8, 2009, pp. 20–33.
• Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. 2006. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Philosophical Romanticism (ed.) 2006. London: Routledge.

[][[ SOME STOLEN WORDS ]][]

"To theorists whose thought is self-consciously developed as a response to some deep and abiding experience of crisis, we might wish to give the name 'crisis thinkers'. Although not always apparent, and certainly too little understood, the experience of crisis may well be the primary inducement to thought in our time, the time of modernity. This is not an accident or some contingent fact about modernity; rather, modernity induces 'crisis thinking' because it is inherently crisis generating." (2006:3)

"revolution is not a moment in the future; it’s a line we trace in the present."

From Woodbine1882:

"Distress. Existential, metaphysical, planetary. If our time resonates with that of other civilizations in the process of collapsing, we have to also note that the collapse we are experiencing is so much worse than that of say ancient Rome. Whereas the inhabitants of these eras witnessed and aided in the passing away of a certain order to the world, the catastrophe we live today is not just a crisis of a world, but of the world.The extent of what we face, as we watch species, languages, and coastlines disappear before our eyes, while we watch ourselves disappear a little more and more with every selfie, is a devastation so total, so encompassing, that we can literally say we have utterly lost the world. Unlike us, the Romans could probably know that even if the structuring, knowledge-giving ground of the empire, or the gods, wouldn’t be there, the literal ground they walked on would in fact still be there. We can’t really say the same."

"Faced with the catastrophe, there are those who get indignant, those who take note, and those who get organized. History depends on those who get organized. Revolution is not a moment in the future; it’s a line we trace in the present." - Woodbine1882

When The Levee Breaks

The levee is not the only thing about to break. 'Time' is the Michael Jordan of catastrophic catalytics. This heat trap of clusterfukk is going down.

 "Crying won't help you, praying won't do you no good..."

"When The Levee Breaks"

Written by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy

Based on Led Zeppelin's version.

Performed by Zepparella

www.zepparella.com

U.S Senator Elizabeth Warren on the Keystone Pipeline

Senator Warren is a baddass. (Why doesn't she run for President?!) In the following short video Warren calls out the Canadian oil industry, and Transcanada in particular who recently spent over 7 million dollars on lobbying U.S politicians directly, and argues that an alternative governmental focus on infrastructure would do much more for the U.S economy and the American people than pushing through the Keystone XL mega-project. The recent intense focus on ramming the pipeline through has to do with POWER and elites doing favours for elites, plain and simple.

the violence of thinking?

Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 1933 (p.150-151):

Occasionally we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingly element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence, for which reason people disavow thought instead of taking pains to make it more thoughtful. But in defining the essence of the thing, what is the use of a feeling, however certain, if thought alone has the right to speak here? Perhaps, however, what we call feeling or mood, here and in similar instances, is more reasonable – that is, more intelligently perceptive – because more open to Being than all that reason which, having meanwhile become ratio, was misinterpreted as being rational. The hankering after the irrational, as abortive offspring of the unthought rational, therewith performed a curious service. To be sure, the current thing-concept always fits each thing. Nevertheless, it does not lay hold of things as it is in its own being, but makes an assault upon it. 

Heidegger was the best among the Nazis - a horrible human being who made massive contributions to public intellectual deliberation. A thinking that opens to thought itself.. or whatever. In the passage above he points out the violence of abstraction, of making a caricature of things, without the wherewithal to understand the facile nature of thinking as such. There is a quality to the type of thinking that is a kind of mood or tone that does not aim to conclude on things and concerns. We do violence to the world when we take our synthetic compositions and projections as the texture of the world in-itself. We assault the world with our all-too-human "truths".

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ASIDE: Interestingly, I think this blog is fast becoming what it was originally meant for: a place for keeping fragments of fragments that influence me, and of which I intend to come back to and incorporate in future projects. An archive, no less, that I hope to burn in the pyre of my own creative activity.

Evan Thompson on network-relational sapience?

Evan Thompson's new book Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (2014) is a hot topic among para-philosophic types these days. I have only been able to glean bits and pieces but won’t get around to reading it until later this year. I’m just bookmarking this here as a reminder.

Here are two excerpts, with some under-formulated comments as chaser:

the brain is always embodied, and its functioning as a support for consciousness can’t be understood apart from its place in a relational system involving the rest of the body and the environment. The physical substrate of mind is this embodied, embedded, and relational network, not the brain as an isolated system.(p.37)

Understanding human sapience as "embodied, embedded, and relational" is where it’s at. Literally. For reals. But in this book Thompson seems to advance a specific (and familiar) philosophical claim: the self is a process, not a thing or an entity, generated in the network dynamics of interacting brains, bodies, and worlds.

At the same time, we can’t infer from the existential or epistemological primacy of consciousness that consciousness has ontological primacy in the sense of being the primary reality out of which everything is composed or the ground from which everything is generated. One reason we can’t jump to this conclusion is that it doesn’t logically follow. That the world as we know it is always a world for consciousness doesn’t logically entail that the world is made out of consciousness. Another reason is that thinking that consciousness has ontological primacy goes against the testimony of direct experience, which speaks to the contingency of our consciousness on the world, specifically on our living body and environment. (p. 102)

Panpsychists take note: your infatuation with your own awareness provides little justification for believing that other objects/assemblages are aware (or experiencing) as well. The most intrusive and self-centered form of ontography follows from believing animal characteristic exemplify existence broadly considered. Sentience and sapience are emergent properties generated via complex elemental materials.

The term “emergence” comes from the Latin verb emergo which means to arise, to rise up, to come up or to come forth. The term was coined by G. H. Lewes in Problems of Life and Mind (1875) who drew the distinction between emergent and resultant effects. [h/t Bill Harryman for this and much more]

Pragmatism (full audiobook)

Pragmatism (1907) contains a series of public lectures held by William James in Boston 1906-7. James provides a popularizing outline of his view of philosophical pragmatism while making highly rhetorical and entertaining lashes towards rationalism and other competing schools of thought. James is especially concerned with the pragmatic view of truth. True beliefs should be defined as, according to James, beliefs that can successfully assist people in their everday life. This is claimed to not be relativism. That reality exists is argued to be a fact true beyond the human subject. James argues, nevertheless, that people select which parts of reality are made relevant and how they are understood to relate to each other.

Pragmatism (1907), by William James

From an introduction to the book by Bruce Kuklick:

James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "cash value" was, and what consequences they led to. A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they were efficacious in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness.

In the section 'What Pragmatism Means', James wrote that the central point of his doctrine of truth is that "Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them."

  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy :: LINK

  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy :: LINK

William James Studies (org): HERE

the legacy of William James in American politics?

William James may be the greatest influence on my attempts at thinking outside of Nietzsche. I always return to his concepts and arguments when I need reminding what philosophy can be in practice, and how to think about things sensibly. I will be posting a boat load of stuff about that guy going forward.

The following informative but extremely boringly lecture was delivered on May 26, 2007 by one James Kloppenberg, a Professor of American History at Harvard University. Apparently he's all about "theories of democracy" and American philosophy in society. Fancy. He the author of A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell, 1995).

James's Pragmatism & American Social Thought 1907-2007

Goffman on Real Definitions?

Frame Analysis (1974) is Erving Goffman's attempt to explain how conceptual frames act as ways to organize experience and structure an individual's perception of society. A “frame” is a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives that organize experiences and guide the perceptions and actions of individuals, groups and societies. Frame analysis, then, is the study of the organization of social experience.

Goffman from Frame Analysis:

"There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the Veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic. (What can better push a book than the claim that it will change what the reader thinks is going on?) A current example of this tradition can be found in some of the doctrines of social psychology and the W. I. Thomas dictum: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." This statement is true as it reads but false as it is taken. Defining situations as real certainly has consequences, but these may contribute very marginally to the events in progress; in some cases only a slight embarrassment flits across the scene in mild concern for those who tried to define the situation wrongly. All the world is not a stage-certainly the theater isn't entirely. (Whether you organize a theater or an aircraft factory, you need to find places for cars to park and coats to be checked, and these had better be real places, which, incidentally, had better carry real insurance against theft.) Presumably, a "definition of the situation" is almost always to be found, but those who are in the situation ordinarily do not create this definition, even though their society often can be said to do so; ordinarily, all they do is to assess correctly what the situation ought to be for them and then act accordingly. True, we personally negotiate aspects of all the arrangements under which we live, but often once these are negotiated, we continue on mechanically as though the matter had always been settled. So, too, there are occasions when we must wait until things are almost over before discovering what has been occurring and occasions of our own activity when we can considerably put off deciding what to claim we have been doing. But surely these are not the only principles of organization. Social life is dubious enough and ludicrous enough without having to wish it further into unreality."

READ THE ENTIRE BOOK: HERE

to build from the actions of others?

Resonating bodies connect and coordinate through the mutual involvement of powers and capacities, intensifying and expanding, becoming more than parts and sums - carving niches and generating socialities from the actions of others. It's not about individuals or collectives, agency vs. structure, but about interdependent actions at multiple levels and with differential rhythms. Thinking the particular modes and movements of any existing ecology is about thinking the 'in-between' of individuals and groups via an ongoing engagement with the specificity of things.

Although I find the distinction between exteriority (the physical) and interiority (the mental) unhelpful and a bit distracting, in the quote below Adrian seems to clearly discern the importance of thinking how entities are always being and becoming-with other things as assemblages.

"An ant colony builds itself from the actions of its members: gathering leaf litter, sticks, bits and pieces of the environing world, tunneling, communicating, building, nursing. None of these ant “individuals,” not even the queen herself, could act in this way without the rest of the colony. Both the body and the mind of the colony—its “objective” parts, those we can see, describe, dissect, and measure, and its “subjective” parts, which are the moments of felt decision that turn an ant this way rather than that way in its crossing of a trail in a forest, or those that bring a team of ants together to haul a large leaf or dead grasshopper—these are all dispersed in space, they are spaced, detached from each other physically (or so it appears when we observe them), but mentally, in terms of the interactive processing of signs and relations, they are networked together into a coordinated collectivity. The network of the colony is not only made of those ant bodies, but also what they are capable of and what they do with things—with soil, leaves, sticks, pieces of food. By most objective measures, anthills are cities: they include complex systems of transportation, communication (pheromone-based), ventilation, sewage disposal, food production (the farming of plants, the growing of fungus, the raising of aphid cattle), cooperative labor, warfare, and slavery." - Adrian Ivakhiv

Scorpion Crown

I'm out of breath and blood,
Having dropped my electric trick
In its lanky grave.
My cheeks only spit dust now,
While scorpions gather round my head
In a crown of dark defiance.
I'm not meant for your fabricated world, or yours -
I'm its mangled death knell.

#poetry

The Cruelest Animal?

Are humans the cruellest animal in this unfathomable kingdom? Perhaps; but only because we are the ones who created the codes that inflate our typical affective capacities enough to even posit cruelty in the first instance. We are cruel because we created the speculative realm in which cruelty can be judged. This takes nothing away from the significances we mount and share and value in relation to each other's fabricated transgressions. We concern ourselves with what is and what registers in our dealings with each other and ourselves. Are we the cruelest? It seems so. But a more fruitful question might be: 'what are we willing to do about it?'