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.

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.

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 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.

"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

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

Post-nihil and the End of Resentiment?

Interest in the post-nihilist tendency is definitely on the rise. But what can be said about thinking that attempts to deflate thinking, other than its contradiction is not performative but narratological?

“Nihilism” is the linguistic-aesthetic form our anxieties take after the humiliating experience of having our phantasies displaced by a world outside our ego. But this is just step one in a much richer experience of humility.

Humans are fundamentally coping-beings: by composition and disposition we seek to make sense and understand ourselves in the context a world teeming with multitudes of others, and overflowing with danger and opportunity – creatures required by circumstance to adapt. But what adaptations are possible for us this late in the ‘game’?

Unfortunately many North Americans tend to reject such realizations and instead invest any accompanying dread of finitude, flesh and animality in delusions of transcendence, consumption and/or fantasy - with T.V or self-medication no less than simple commodities - in order to sooth the pain of their existential resentments and fear. To be sure, there are differences in the manner people respond, but i believe the push and pull of consumption, ego-centric hope and distraction remain paramount.

The task of conscious observers (and not just intellectuals) today is to begin to indulge rather than mask the nihilistic forces of contemporary life – forces that manifest and register existentially, environmentally, and poltically in a variety of objective ways. We must partake instead of continuing to deny the dark revelations of current crises in order to push each other towards more earthly, or creaturely, that is to say ecological modes of thinking and doing. Realizing and coping-with the transcorporeal facticity of life entails communicating and making explicit our intimate connections with the planet and its beings, but it also requires us to explore and engage the inherent precarity and ontological vulnerability with-in the natural world through association, design and infrastructure.

As Levi Bryant has stated:

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.

Every step taken after nihilism is a movement towards something substantially more realistic and practical, yet significantly less dramatic. We return home to the dark wilderness within which we had always already carved our niches. And we need not resent this state of affairs. We can embrace the opportunities afforded us and celebrate our circumscribed and awkward freedoms by adapting and assembling, and fleeing the ruin machines of pathological culture and founding new communities. We can become different.

Nothing is more essential in a full and genuine apocalypticism than the coincidentia oppositorum which it realizes between an absolute No-saying and an absolute Yes-saying, one inseparable from the final advent of an absolute darkness and an absolute light.  This is luminously clear in Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, already the madman’s proclamation of the death of God (The Gay Science, par. 125) reveals that we are now straying as through an infinite nothing, night and more night is coming on all the while, a night of the world which is an apocalyptic night, and one which is the deepest ending in history. Here, the death of God is not only an ultimate historical event, it is the most ultimate event that has ever occurred, one wiping away our entire horizon.  

But even if this is the darkest of all nights, it is nevertheless the most glorious of all possible dawns, for it releases an absolute and final Yes-saying, a Yes-saying which is the very opposite of ressentiment, and a Yes-saying whose revelation is Nietzsche’s ultimate calling.  

Now and only now a history inaugurated by ressentiment is ending, an ending that is the ending of the actuality of every possible subject, and is that ending precisely because it is the death of God. Yet this is the very death releasing a final and ultimate nihilism, a nihilism which is the tomb of God, and a nihilism which is the very arena of the ecstatic affirmation of a uniquely modern or postmodern Eternal Recurrence.[source]

Post-nihilist praxis is thus an experimental mode of embodied enagement oriented towards operationalizing novel and actionable strategies, communications and adaptations to the myriad creeping potencies of nonhuman flows and assemblages both within and without. If we are to rebuild from the ruins of this mad civilization the important work to be done is decidedly practical.

Pluralism as Realism?

“Pluralism is not an alternative to realism. It is simply realism without its chest puffed out, showing off. Pluralism is realism that recognises the multiple paths that any trajectory can follow and the beautiful plumage that can grace any mode of existence.” – Phillip, Circling Squares

Recently a series of posts have appeared among the usual philosophy blogger suspects chatting up the differences between and possible commensurability of 'realism' and 'pluralism' viz. the ontographic enterprise. First Jeremy Trombley offered some thoughts on the value of the ‘ontological turn’ in Anthropology (see here and here), to which Levi Bryant responded (see here, here and here), followed up by a plethora of posts by James Stanescu, Phillip, Matthew Segall, Terence Blake, David Roden (here) and now Bill at Critical Fantasies (here). Arran and I try to present a post-nihilist position on the issues here and here. All involved are providing interesting perspective on the topic and the comment sections on each blog bristle with insight. If you are into philosophy/theory and ontographic musings check out the scene. I recommend checking out the comprehensive list of the related posts compiled by James HERE. I’m sure this 'debate', now playfully dubbed the 'Pluralism Wars' by Stanescu, will continue to evolve  so keep an eye out for developments and links at the host sites.

What follows are two brief points I want to make as a supplement to the debate rather than an intervention per se. The comments are brief and underdeveloped because I don't envision having much to offer simply because, as Arran James reminds us, critical pragmatics forecloses the possibility of saying "I am for or against pluralism". I think issues surrounding 'pluralism' are methodological issues not about the efficacy of ontological commitments. In many ways this debate is more about negotiating 'frameworks' or habits of thinking than it is about what ontography as a practice can do or might offer. And, as always, my interests have less to do with sifting and shifting particular theoretical stances than  in fashioning conceptual 'tools' for coping-with and engaging the Real viz. the tactical and pragmatic reorganization of actually existing ecologies of matter-energy (which for me includes expressive activities, knowledges and practices). I have a more developed take on the relationship between realism, pluralism and politics posted over at Synthetic Zero (here) so go check that out if you want temporary brain damage.

Now for the babbling gibberish:

1. The only realism worthy its claims is a type of pluralism:

It can be argued that the all too human production of Truth is only ever about adequation: the tentative sorting and symbolic coding of associative experience via recursive cognition. Truth is fashioned by human cognizers thru an embodied, social, and ultimately limited cognitive-linguistic coping process. We accomodate our experiences with the linguistic and cognitive resources at hand. Truths are the artifacts and instruments of our accomodations.

This, of course, brings us close to the traditional pragmatist notion of truth as that which 'works' for us in a given situation. And the truth of what works for us is, therefore, relative to the situations or forms of life we inhabit. That truths are relative to the realities and forms of life we enact, and thus locally devised, should come as no suprise to contemporary theorists. Most researchers have come to appreciate the diversity of perspectives which contribute to the creation of all truth-claims about the Real. Perspective is multiple because reality and its modes contain multitudes. However, what requires strong emphasis here, in relation to realism, is that in the general ecology of materials and expressions human ‘truths’ are always in the mix with other non-linguistic realities and never on outside looking in. The process of semiotic and communicative coping-with always takes place in complex situations of diverse and autonomous non-discursive forces and assemblages. And if we are in the mix with a myriad of independently existing stratified and interwoven realities, as realists would naturalistically concede, then as beings trying to find our way in the world we will be moved to account for this complexity in some manner.

In this truncated sense, then, 'pluralism' of some sort is unavoidable if we want to take up a naturalist ontographic project. Multiple perpectives and ontic multiplicity necessitate complex forms of knowing and relating. Pluralism is thus primarily a methodological issue for the realist: in fashioning realistic models or narratives or discourses we have to be rigorous in addressing the actuality of multitudes - the varieties of materials and perspectives in play. To be clear, the most adept truth-seekers and inquirers among us are, almost by default, both realists and pluralists. A lack of adequation in this regard leads only to impoverished modes of ontography.

2. The only pluralism worthy of its claims is a type of realism:

The traumatic presence of the Real – as the disclosed thru interactions with entities and intensities of all sorts – is not an issue of argumentative persuasion but of confrontation and adaptation within a wilderness of consequential force and material assembly. Reality is raw and thick enough not to be explained away. The Real is that which must be coped-with 'beyond' and ‘below’ the level of explanation itself. The raw operations of corporeal necessity waits for no ideology, no matter how slickly composed and logical ordered. And so if pluralism is an attempt to take into account divergences in perspective and experience, as well as to articulate the different modes of existence and levels of complexity in the world, then it is also an attempt to fashion an adequate relationship to a ever-present reality that affords perspective and multiplicity in the first place (or in the last instance). It is an attempt at a kind of realism. Why maintain a pluralistic attitude or adopt pluralist practices if reality does not demand it? The wild diversity of the Real compels us to meet complexity with complexity.

“[T]he importance of the pluralist project, philosophically (and realistically) speaking: to compel attention to the specific ways in which different things must be addressed in order to be properly articulated in their own terms.” – Phillip, Circling Squares

 Both pluralism and realism make claims about the matrix of reality within which each discourse and set of methods emerges. To this extent they are commensurate discursive possibilities. The real does not need defending. It requires negotiation.

Comments and criticism are encouraged.

synthetic_zero

Any change in determining conditions is never a complete re-coordination of components, but rather a complex adjusting of variable elements according to intrinsic properties and extrinsic force. So it is with base materiality and so it is with any of our scaffolded sapient worldviews.

This blog has been a lot of things for me: an extension of my personality, a platform for sorting of interests, but more concretely it has always been a tool for inquiry and expression. Since 2009 i have explored a variety of obsessions: from speculative theory, fringe politics, evolutionary science and ecology to architecture, art, depth psychology and popular culture – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and human encounters in between. However situations change. I have changed.

These past few months have been tumultuous with regard to my conceptual grasping of the world and its entities. Step backs and switch-backs and revisitations have led to intensive thetic mutations and shifting political sentiments. Living and ‘managing’ routines, needs and psyches in the context of rapid dissolution and continuing reorganization of the world-flesh by anarchic forces of production (hyper-abstraction) and pseudo and mega wish-fulfillment(as a multitude of egos amplified exponentially) has brought me to the brink. Nothing I think I know makes sense in light of what I am experiencing. Its time to cross the threshold.

I am no longer driven to pursue individualized intellectual processing. On my own I am a mere glitch. Nothing but a momentary capture of language and associations. But with others I become more: we become. As an assemblage our powers are increased and new capacities emerge. And it is only in the ‘we’ that the Eaarth and its woven sublime can be adequately disclosed. Knowledge tokens and bio-understandings are always (co)enacted and disclosed socially, as intact ecosystems. Only thru collaboration between elements and materials do new configurations occur. The Madness of one becomes tempered by the madness of the more-than-one so that whole worlds (as multiplicities and spaces with differential dimensions) can be devoured, transformed and rebirthed. 

So moving forward (and backward and sideways perhaps) I will be focusing most of my energies on a new joint project - involving Arran (from Attempts At Living) and lurking-linker extraordinaire Dirk (dmf) and guided by a shared concern with evolving more sophisticated speculative and praxis-oriented responses to the continued collapse of contemporary ecological, socioeconomic and ideological realities. Below is a basic outline:

synthetic_zero

about: Synthetic_Zero is a project designed to explore the challenges and opportunities of being & becoming human after nihilism. The collaborative approach pursued here is intended as an experimental response to the various crises, disjunctions and unequally distributed realities of contemporary life. At different moments this website will act as research tool, culture hacking platform, and crucible for critical discussion – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and mutant encounters in-between. We seek to salvage and explore the various speculative and pragmatic opportunities afforded by established disciplines and traditions of inquiry (from philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, social work, and ecology) while simultaneously assembling insights and sensibilities from across the spectrum of human expression and engagement (from art, literature, architecture, urban design, indigenous politics, and various social movements). Our intention is to cultivate more flexible and adaptive modes of relating and existing. There are many ways to live among ruins and here we will explore most of them.

Archive Fire will continue to function as a space for personal reflection and individual explorations in rhetoric, style and self-expression - while all new formal and para-academic content will be shared at synthetic zero and will command most of my attention.

Thank you to all the readers, participants and the many supporters of this blog over the last 4 years. I hope you enjoy the new direction/focus here and please check out what Arran, Dirk and I are up to over at syntheticzero.net. Until then…

S.C Hickman on Hope and the Dystopic Impulse

The brilliant and always concise S.C Hickman has another insight-full post up at Noir Realism in which he writes:

The breakup of the Platonist view of reality and discourse that has, as Wittgenstein suggested, held us ‘captive’ within a Cartesian/Lockean picture that seeks both an objective essence and a cohesive, coherent, self has been replaced in our time by a “Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment – doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain (p. xxiii, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope).” Among those tools is language, words, which are no longer seen as ‘representations’ of an objective truth/reality, but as tools by which the human animal negotiates the complex horizon of social relations. Rorty sees this break with the idea that reality can be ‘represented’ as abandoning the correspondence ‘theory of truth’, which means that we no longer need to insist that truth, like reality is one and seamless.

The post-nihilist impulse unabashedly rejects discourses motivated by sentimental allusions to universals. The advent of hypermediation via communication and digital technologies has combined with what Ray Brassier has called "the negative consummation of the enlightenment", as well as the ever-expanding assaults on the living flesh and ecological stability of humans everywhere to create a crisis of legitimacy for every existing linguistic and normative institution on the planet. We do not inhabit a modern or even ‘postmodern’ world, we subsist in an advanced industrial calamity. The future of our species will depend entirely upon the willingness of people to abandon our previous and varied delusions for intensely reflective strategies of praxis and collective habitation. We have to design new delusions for vastly more pragmatic ecologies. The all too human project of becoming, being and coping-with happens between and often beyond both hope and despair.

Read the rest of Hickman’s post: HERE

Coexistence and the Work of Revolution

In “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”, anthropologist David Graeber asks an extremely important question:

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

What is revolution? This might be the core political question of our time. In contemporary conditions where all hitherto categorical distinctions (between nature and culture, subject and object, etc.) and conventional boundaries (between human bodies and machines, between nation-states and corporations) are bleeding into each other or melting away, what resources are we to call upon in order to begin forging more humane and positive political commitments?  The very context of our lives and social actions has never been so ambiguous and massively distributed, and yet so manipulated, managed and massaged. Where do we begin?

In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“In all revolutions there are members of the privileged class who make common cause with the revolutionaries, and members of the oppressed class who remain faithful to the privileged. And every nation has its traitors. This is because the nation and class are neither versions of fate which hold the individual in subjection from the outside nor values which he posits from within. They are modes of co-existence which are a call upon him. Under conditions of calm, the nation and the class are there as stimuli to which I respond only absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolutionary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those pre-conscious relationships with class and nation, hitherto merely lived through, into the definite taking of a stand; the tacit commitment becomes explicit. But it appears to itself as anterior to decision.” (p.423)

Here Merleau-Ponty accepts the conditions in which political bodies are both determined and self-determining, however haphazardly such agency might seem. It is the gathering up, positioning and self-organizing power of individuals in situ - the ‘taking a stand’ in the world – that links their imaginations and motivations to lived contexts and affords them the opportunity to transform pre-reflective conditionings into explicit revolutionary commitments. In this sense, the work of being and becoming human is always a revolutionary act in that what is latent or merely possible in us, and circulating throughout our dynamic modes of existence, is always in the process of being expressed and assembled. The very act of becoming and being human contributes the co-invention of worlds. And so political situations are always ecological and cosmological.

Transcorporeal politics, then, is fundamentally about developing, tinkering with and contesting distributed modes of generation wherein social assemblages and agentic bodies of all ontic varieties are engaged and politicized at the different levels of material and expressive organization appropriate to their functioning. Each complex matrix of possibility is a composite of material flows, associations and proximities affording different political moves, tactics and forms which includes but are never limited to symbolic representation and discursive exchanges. We always co-determine our world with other humans and non-humans (and in-humans) through reciprocal but often uneven exchanges of properties, powers and capacities – setting the very conditions for what then becomes possible. And within this simultaneously wild  and contingent field of compound possibility what we do, as one kind of being among others, affects the capacities and sustain-ability of a myriad of other entities, communities and tangible networks. The work of the revolutionary thus becomes the engagement of whole worlds: an ecological praxis enriched through sapient and sensitive explorations which flow into deliberational alterings of the very modes of our relative becoming. Revolution is co-evolution always and forever.

[[ hat tip to Adam Robbert and Jeremy Trombley on the Graeber piece ]]

Manuel DeLanda - Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture

April 9, 2004, 'Art and Technology Lecture Series' 

at Columbia University: 

Manuel DeLanda (b. in Mexico City, 1952) is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, DeLanda focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the 'new materialism'.

Manuel De Landa is the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School EGS, and former Adjunct Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York). He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), Deleuze: History and Science (2010), and Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011) 

Michel Foucault on Truth and Subjectivity

On October 20 and 21, 1980, Michel Foucault presented the Howison Lectures in philosophy at UC Berkeley. The subject for his talks was "truth and subjectivity":

  

LISTEN TO MORE: HERE

Brené Brown - The Price of Invulnerability

From TEDx:

 Synopsis: In our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times -- joy. This talk by Brené Brown will explore how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships -- and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning:

 

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she has spent a lifetime studying courage, shame, authenticity, wholeheartedness and vulnerability. She is the Behavioral Health Scholar-in-Residence at the Council on Alcohol and Drugs and has written several books on her research.

Brené Brown - The Power of Vulnerability

Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent the past ten years studying a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness, posing the questions: How do we engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough -- that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy?

Below is her talk at TEDxHouston on wholeheartedness and vulnerability:

 

Theorizing Vulnerability

“We inhabit a time when things have become more fragile and urgently in need of delicate tending. At the same time, a large section of the populace is belligerently opposed to recognition of this condition. It is a time when militant pressure to engage the fragility of things must be joined to acknowledgment of the limited ability of the human estate to master the world. It is thus a paradoxical time.” - William E. Connolly

Vulnerability is a ubiquitous characteristic positioning us in relation to each other, the state, the earth and the whole of existence. I argue that ecological vulnerabilities, corporeal vulnerabilities, existential vulnerabilities, and sociocultural vulnerabilities are different manifestations of a fundamental ontological vulnerability intrinsic to reality.
All existences and objects are exposed and mingle with innumerable elements and essences, all of which combine, dissipate, re-combine, and affect other bodies in ways that can be only imperfectly or partially foreseen or forestalled. Bodies are fundamentally worldly: open and extended outwards in order to sustain and nourish themsleves. Our bodies are intrinsically processual: capable of touching and being touched by other bodies and things, exposed to possibilities we can neither completely enumerate nor fully articulate. 

In her 2004 book Precarious Life, Judith Butler wrote:

"The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. Indeed, if I deny that prior to the formation of my “will,” my body related me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I build a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then am I denying the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?" (p.26) 

In this sense, my body is ontologically sense-able and therefore response-able to so many other entities (both human and nonhuman) and, perhaps more disturbingly, perpetually open to the precariousness and wildness of being as such. A basic acknowledgment and exploration of this fundamental openness can generate all kinds of social, ethical and existential considerations and conversations regarding human beings. As Merleau-Ponty reminded us, “the world is not what I think, but what I live through” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. xvi-xvii ).

Judith Butler again:

"Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an institutionalized fantasy of mastery) can fuel the instruments of war. We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others. Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition? (Ibid., p.29)  

As an important and productive bridging concept between disciplines, theorizing vulnerability in all its onto-specific manifestations is at the core of what I term applied ontography. Applied ontography as I practice it seeks nuanced, non-dogmatic and pragmatic understandings of the dependencies, individuations, interdependencies, flow patterns, meshworks, connections, boundary limits, causal networks, assemblages and material potencies from which our lives and social institutions emerge. Such provisional understandings are then put to use through direct engagements with the practical and political projects of everyday hominid life. To be sure, the resulting heuristics, working models and tentative frameworks are only the expressive/epistemic dimension of these practical (infra-structural) engagements at work in the world - to be used, revised and refigured in relation to specific contexts of application.

In the introduction to Frames of War (2010), Butler wrote:

"I want to argue that if we are to make broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first have to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work, and the claims of language and social belonging. To refer to “ontology” in this regard is not to lay claim to a description of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organization. On the contrary, none of these terms exist outside of their political organization and interpretation. The “being” of the body to which this ontology refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology." (pp. 2-3) 

In the video below participants in The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2012: "Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities," directly address issues of vulnerability in ways that highlight the importance recognizing vulnerability as a universal characteristic of the world we inhabit. The video features brief but fascinating presentations from eminent academics in a variety of fields, and includes a interesting panel discussion with Martha Albertson Fineman, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Colin Dayan, Ilaria Vanni, and moderator Elizabeth Castelli. Each participant discusses the political and practical implications of recognizing and better theorizing vulnerability at multiple scales in the context of their unique projects and research.

This event took place on March 3, 2012 at Barnard College:

 

In The Autonomy Myth (2005), Martha Fineman discusses the “universal, constant and complex” nature of vulnerability and interdependency at the level of health-care and politics, showing how the metaphysics/ideology of the so-called ‘autonomous liberal subject’ is a (mis)leading assumption at the heart of most dehumanizing Western capitalist cultural activities.

Here is Judith Butler again, from Precarious Life (2004):

 "One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others. But in that order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value." (pp. xii-xiii)

"[T]here is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.  

Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of “I.” This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue. I mean, we can argue with it, but we are perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do." (Ibid., p.31)

Tahltan Nation Continues to Inspire

From Tahltan Central Council: 

TORONTO - The Tahltan Nation of northern B.C. (Canada) [was] honoured [yesterday] in Toronto with a national "Top 10" environmental achievement award for the recent permanent protection of the "Sacred Headwaters" from natural gas development. 

The Tides Canada award will be an emotional victory, because it comes at a time when new coal mining projects are also being proposed for the exact same region, and are stirring worries. "Shell Oil may be gone from our traditional lands, but new coal mining proposals are a major concern too," says Annita McPhee, President of Tahltan Central Council.  

 Last December, Tahltan Central Council, Shell Canada, and the B.C. government announced the end to natural-gas exploration in the Klappan region of northwest B.C. Shell voluntarily gave up its tenure for the area.  

It marked the end of years of negotiations, and a difficult struggle that included protests, road blocks, and elders being arrested.  

The next steps for the Sacred Headwaters, says McPhee, will be engaging constructively with the coal mining companies. She says she is guided by elders who say economic development must be done sustainably, without poisoning the sacred waterways that are home to wild salmon and moose.  

"Our concern is, mining companies are proposing to build right in the headwaters. They want to put their tailing ponds right where our people have one of our hunting camps." "We are not against economic development. We just believe the benefits should far outweigh the impacts." Off limits, she says are certain ecologically and culturally sensitive zones in the Klappan.

McPhee received the award last night on behalf of the Tahltan Nation at the Arta Gallery in Toronto. The Tides Canada award will be shared with Shell Canada, Forest Ethics, Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, and the B.C. government.

The Tahltans still must live and struggle with copper and gold mines that are seeking to expand and intensify within Tahltan traditional lands.

On Being and Coping - Part 1: Ontic Relation and Object Access

“Sensing is not ruled by the ‘I think’ which, according to Kant, must accompany all apperception. In sensing, nothing is apperceived. The sensing being, the animal, does not confront its world as a thinking being, but is, rather, related to it simply in uniting and separating.” (Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman, 1963: 197) 

“Language scatters the totality of all that touches us most closely even while it arranges it in order. Through language, we can never grasp what matters to us for it eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears” (Bataille, Eroticism, 1986: 274).  

"You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions."  (Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 2007: 1)  

Arran James has responded (here) to my last post (here) with a generous exploration of the thesis that ‘absolute withdrawal’ is a feature of epistemic relations (hermeneutics) only and not of structural relations (material affectivity) of objects generally. In short, objects are absolutely autonomous of our conception of them. Objects are never equivalent to our perceptions, interpretations, or stories. Yet, however accurate such a claim may be, it also remains the case that many objects can and do encounter – affect, influence, absorb, activate, dissolve, empower, etc., – each other directly in structurally efficacious ways beyond or at least ‘below’ conceptuality. This is the crux of my divergence with object-oriented ontologies (OOO) [see here for more detail].

Now one might be inclined to wonder if I am setting up a kind of unnecessary dualism here by distinguishing between structural encounters and epistemic encounters? That is a fair question. To be sure, I am supporting a kind of weak version of the classical distinction between "the sensible" and "the intelligible". But I am NOT suggesting that ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are different substances. They are not. What I am suggesting is that there are different kinds of interactions taking place at different levels of complex materiality (strata). Which is to say material affectivity and structural relation occur at different levels and in different ways than epistemic relations that are often independent of processes of apprehension, signification and "translation".

Without a doubt embodied cognition (which in my usage includes both emotion and logical operations, in mingling proportions as per neuro-anatomy) involves recursion and includes projective subjectivity (‘qualia’) – what I refer to as the phastasmic character of experience, and what Lacan refers to as 'the imaginal’ – not present in less complex objects. Not all material assemblages/structures are capable of mental operations (“mind”) because cognitive activities/powers involve distinctly emergent capacities irreducible to less complex physical processes. Such recursive-phantasmic capabilities (powers) are specific to entities with central nervous systems, and are what affords animals an emergent capacaity for iconic/symbolic signification and epistemic memory. And he biological capacities for recursion, memory, signification and synthetic apprehension (or animal coding) are precisely what allows for what I refer to above as epistemic relations. We experience and imagine; we sense and we code. It is the activity of signifying, apprehending and relating to the world via epistemic coding which remains ‘absolutely withdrawn’ from other entities.

So I certainly agree with Heidegger, Harman, Morton and others when they suggest that objects are never equivalent to our animal interpretations and conceptions. The crucial point with regard to my disagreement with OOO is that embodied human thought as an onto-specific capacity is deployed and operates differently in the world than how, say, dynamite works in relation granite. Non-signifying objects (such as dynamite) often interact with other objects (like granite) in ways that make a structural difference to their material composition below the level of explicit cognitive acts. There are different kinds of entities which enfold different levels of organization, activity and relation, and these differences make all the difference. [see here for more detail]

By this I do not suggest some sort of naïve ‘billiard-ball’ causation where pure substances rub up against each other, but rather that certain types of assemblages/objects relate in ways that directly influence the operational character or functional arrangement (structure) of others through the exchange of information and energy. Causality is never simple or unmediated but always complex and precarious. And so the sorts of interactions (events) that take place between entities are entirely contingent upon the kinds of entities involved - relative to their material and onto-specific capacities. ‘Withdrawal’ at a non-cognitive and pre-reflective level of materiality is then an issue of structural access via complexity (or ‘depth’) and material composition as opposed to an issue of epistemic access within representational thought.

I must admit at this point that my awareness of the problematics of epistemic access/relation is precisely why I enjoy Tim Morton’s project as much as I do. Tim is brilliant at pointing out the alienation, epistemic problems and associated existential anxieties generated by the inability of humans to come to grips with the gap between our apprehension/interpretations and the things-in-themselves (cf. Derrida on undecidability). Morton’s “dark ecology” offers a way forward to begin to thematize (rationalize?) this epistemic gap while simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically activating an uncanny appreciation for the structural intimacy of the world, or of what he calls ‘the Mesh’. I will certainly have much more to say in the coming months about the possibilities Tim is setting forth in his recent work, but I just wanted to acknowledge here the profound influence Tim’s work continues to have on me in this regard.

With that said, let me return to some of the wonderful points Arran brings up in his post. Arran writes:

Michael rejects the idea that objects are absolutely withdrawn from one. Instead, Michael suggests that all objects are ontically open to one another in such a way as to establish an ‘intimacy’. This would also be the grounds of possibility for the intelligibility of alterity: how could we speak of alterity if things never encountered one another at all? The point is that if objects were absolutely withdrawn they would recede from any point of access whatsoever. In such a world no thing could ever be touched, held, burnt, used, left, ignored, known etc.

I don’t know if I have ever stated it quite that way but Arran is correct, I maintain that some kind of access, namely structural access/relation, is required as “the grounds of possibility for the intelligibility of alterity”. This doesn’t mean that we can come to total knowledge of any particular entities, because, as I argue above, epistemic closure is impossible, but that through the various structural (complex and multi-leveled) relations with things we can at the very least gain some intimacy with them by phantasizing symbolically and communicating with each other about them. Without structural access/relation alterity would be unintelligibility and epistemic coding impossible.

This is precisely where my pragmatic commitments come to the fore. If humans can only have structural access to things-in-themselves, and only ever fashion approximate knowledge of objects and assemblages through signification practices and epistemic phantasies, then what actually matters is how we pragmatically act, react and cope in the world in relation to them. Insert all the references to Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and ‘family resemblances’,  Rorty’s ‘ironism’, and/or any other post-critical concessions you want right here. The bottom-line is that immanent structural – or perhaps infrastructural – relations have traceable consequences via the onto-specific powers or potencies (or what Bryant refers to as ‘pluri-potencies’) of things at a pre-reflective level of direct material-energetic affectivity. And the distal stories (narratives, ontologies, etc.) we tell ourselves about these consequential interactions – however poetic or meaning-full, or instrumental (useful) they may be – are basically coping mechanisms to help us make our way in the wild world as fully enfleshed beings-in-the-world.

In a passionate and radically illustrative passage Arran writes:

Absolute withdrawal is a thesis of absolute autonomy of every substance from every other substance to the point where all and every thing vanishes. But that isn’t the world we live in. We live in a world of violence and suffering, of bullets and bombs, of fast food and big screen TVs, of kissing lovers, and 4 year old boys who refuse to let you write blog posts. We live in a world where we’ve gathered a fair bit of knowledge. Hard knowledge garnered from natural science. In other words, it seems that the claim that objects are absolutely withdrawn is false.

As a psychiatric nurse I know that such a claim is false. I use drugs synthesised by psychopharmacologists that, once injected into the flesh, directly do things to the patient’s nervous system. Conversation and phenomenographic accounts of patient experience also relate how this can profoundly alter the way patients couple to their environments. This leads to the enaction of profoundly different worlds. Thinking on such an example is illustrative. I can only do my job because people have had direct if partial access to things. I can only do my job because other things have direct access to still more things. The generation of and radical difference between my experience of an episode of medication administration and my patient’s is only possible because of the specific ways in which we and the things involved in that situation are open to each other. That openness constitutes the kind of intimacy that provides us with experiential evidence of the impossibility of absolute withdrawal. Instead, situations or worlds are produced by the unique ensemble of interoperating operations of uniquely relating substances.

There is no way I could provide a better account than Arran has above. I believe ontographic rigor insists that we respect the power and interdependencies of the things-themselves. When we respect the things-in-themselves we give to them what is theirs but not more: we respect their contingent existence and finitude, and we acknowledge their ontic particularity and irreducible complexity, but we also appreciate their dependencies and the affordances they require to exist. So in this context anthropomorphizing the cosmos by projecting cognitive capacities onto pre-cognitive processes is a failure of ontographic imagination. We simply should not insist that every entity operates according to our all too human metaphysical proclivities. Instead, hominid ontography insists that we attempt to code  our formal relations with entities in ways most consistent with what each thing or assemblage can do structurally via their powers and capacities, and with the networks or ecologies which support and co-enact them.

[[ to be continued ]]

Ecologies of Imaginal Space

"If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

The first step toward re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination – an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.

To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the waters in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars." [source]

-- Arundhati Roy

“This is not about getting back to nature.
It is about understanding we’ve never left.”
-- Sierra Club poster