What Does a Holocaust Look Like?

Zižek on the Duty of a Philosopher

"I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!”    – Slavoj Zižek [source]

More Quotes and Aphorisms: here

Gary Williams on Meillassoux, Perception and Ecological Realism

Gary Williams has a fantastic post up at Brains and Minds on his reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Although Gary has some positive things to say about Meillassoux’s offerings, I agree with Gary in his critique of Meillassoux’s implicit acceptance of various metaphysical baggage - particularily with regards to human perception.

Gary goes on to use some of Heidegger's more 'realist' strains of thinking to make some very significant points about how perception actually works, and how a certain kind of “ecological realism” escapes many of the problems Meillassoux raises.

Check out the excerpt below and then go read the rest of his amazing post here.

My difficulty with Meillassoux is that he never even stops to consider if there are alternative ways to conceive of the organism-Earth perceptual relationship. He would be wise to read some of J.J. Gibson’s work on ecological optics. Indeed, for Heidegger (who I read in Gibsonian terms), sensations have nothing to do with perception. Accordingly, relation is simply the wrong term to describe the perceptual-intentional experience. For Heidegger and for Gibson, perceptual experience is not a matter of generating sensations or “having” sensations. If we examine his language, we can see that Meillassoux buys into the very object-metaphor that Heidegger critiques so vehemently in describing the sensuous process. Meillassoux always talks about “the” sensible, “the” perception, or “the” sensation, as if these things actually were things. But the sensible is precisely not something which comes into existence or is generated when a subject is alongside the Earth. To think this is to misunderstand the intentionality of perception.

Strictly speaking, the most primordial perceptual experience of an organism perceiving the Earth is not characterized by the “having” of things called “sensations”. To believe so is to fall prey to the object metaphors that Modern philosophy has corrupted the philosophy of perception with. As Heidegger says, perception is not about returning one’s “booty” of sensation back to the “cabinet” of consciousness. Instead, perception is a matter of encountering the phenomenon. And crucially, the genuine phenomenon for Heidegger is not the appearance within a consciousness, but rather, that which is known in perception, namely, the things themselves. “Phenomena are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light”. What lies in the light of the day? The Earth! Indeed, it is the planet Earth upon which the sun shines.

Accordingly, perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity. And of course, our entire history of responding to the Earth, from conception until death, is determinate for how we react to the phenomena. This is where circumspective interpretation and “temporalization” comes in. Every encounter with the Earth is an interpretation or “projection” based on what we bring to the phenomenon in accordance with the fundamental historicity of our factical life experience.

Gary Williams is a graduate student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His primary interests are at the intersection between phenomenology and cognitive science, with a special interest in the philosophy of perception. Gary describes his own project this way:

I utilize an ecological – or situated – approach to understanding the human-world interaction. By emphasizing the social and linguistic dimensions of human cognitive experience, I hope to update Heideggerian concepts in light of recent research in the 4EA paradigm (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affective). I am also interested in reviving Julian Jaynes’ theory of consciousness by integrating it with a Heideggerian-Gibsonian framework for thinking about externalist perception.

Learn More @ Minds and Brains

Kanehsatake - A Resistance Story

Today marks the 20th anniversary of what some called the "Oka Crisis" - but was in fact the Onkwehonwe defence of sacred Kanien’kehaka land in Québec, Canada. For the Kanien’kehaka community at Kanesatake it was the culmination of 270 years of silent war waged against them in the form colonial indifference and land theft.

"This land is ours, ours as a heritage given to us as a sacred legacy. It is the place where our fathers lie buried beneath those trees, where our mothers sang our lullaby, and you would tear it from us an leave us wonderers at the mercy of fate." – Chief Joseph Onasakenrat of Kanesatake

Triggered in the immediate sense by the threat of a golf course expansion and condominium development onto land that the community held sacred, by the time the “crisis” came to an end the Oyenko:ohntoh (warriors) of the Kanien’kehaka had held off the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and finally even the Canadian Armed Forces, and they were joined in their resistance by Onkwehonwe from all over Turtle Island, from Canada, the United States and as from as far away as Mexico. Along with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico 4 years later, the resistance at Kanesatake set the scene for the last 20 years of indigenous resurgence against the colonial state.

Their Story @ The Speed of Dreams

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is a 1993 feature-length (1:59:21), multi-award winning documentary by Native American filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin set in the thick of the armed confrontation between Native American Mohawks and Canadian government forces during the 1990 standoff in the Mohawk village of Kanehsatake near the village of Oka in Quebec. The two-and-a-half month ordeal received brief national attention when the Mohawk warriors of Kahnawake, in support of their brothers from nearby Kanehsatake, temporarily held the busy Mercier Bridge leading to Montreal, in an effort to bring world attention to the situation.

WATCH THE ENTIRE DOCUMENTARY BELOW:

Starting with plans to construct a luxury housing development and expand a private golf course into the Pines, part of Mohawk Nation's land, tensions rose quickly and tempers flared as Mohawks were once again fighting for their sovereignty. After a police officer was killed in a raid to expel the Mohawks from the Pines, the situation spiraled out of control.

In scene after startling scene the drama escalates as the Quebec police are replaced by units from the Canadian army. With few exceptions journalists covering the crisis either evacuated or were forcibly removed. Alanis Obomsawin spent the final weeks of the standoff without a crew, shooting on video and using the slow speed on her sound recorder to stretch out her limited supply of audio tape.

Obomsawin's detailed portrayal of the Mohawk community places the Oka crisis within the larger context of Mohawk land rights dating back to 1535 when France claimed the site of present-day Montreal which had been the Mohawk village of Hochelaga. Her evocative dimension of the conflict, exploring the fierce conviction of the Mohawks and the communal spirit that enabled them to stand firm.

Zižek and the End of Capitalist Reality

Our current capitalist system is untenable. We find ourselves on the brink of massive problems that call for drastic solutions. Meanwhile whatever remains of "the left" has been hedged in by western liberal democracy and seems to lack the energy to come up any solutions at all.  Where do we look for truly radical ideas today?

In the provocative video below Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek responds to a bombardment of popular media images and quotes by modern-day thinkers - and discusses economic crisis, ecological collapse, war in Afghanistan and the end of democracy. It is fascinating to watch Zizek's whirlwind-like preformance as he launches forth with characteristic polemic style to ruthlessly criticize modern capitalism and to give his view on our common future.

The Adaptive Brain in Action

Neural circuitry is constantly changing to meet the challenges of its environment. But what actually happens to our brains as we experience the outside world? Scientists have learned that the brain undergoes structural changes as it absorbs sensory data, learns and adapts, but the actual mechanism of this process is just now coming into view.

Below is a transcript of an interview with Tobias Bonhoeffer, director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, about how new techniques enable researchers to watch the neuronal process of adaptation as never before. The original interview was conducted on June 10, 2010.

Q: Could you start by giving us a brief preview of what you’ll be covering in your FENS lecture?

BONHOEFFER: What we’re working on in my lab is neuronal plasticity -- how the brain adapts to changes in the environment. Such adaptations can be relatively straightforward. For example, if an animal loses a limb or an eye, the brain adapts to that and partially compensates for the missing information. Other adaptations are more subtle – when, for instance, an animal hides food for the winter and remembers the place later on. Although these things may seem quite different, they have one thing in common, namely that in both cases the brain enables an animal to adapt its behavior because of challenges in its environment.

Over the last couple of years our field has made such fundamental progress that we are now able to really look into the brain and see how it works, in the living animal. We are now able to see the changes related to such adaptations and to see how nerve cells form new connections or how connections between nerve cells are broken. This is basically what I will cover in my lecture. I will talk about our studies investigating what happens when nerve cells make new connections in vitro, i.e. in cell culture. I will on the other hand also talk about our in vivo studies, in which we study the intact organism. We are now able to look into the brain of an animal and see how nerve cell connections are made or broken, and how that relates to learning or other adaptive changes.

Q: How close are you to understanding the mechanism of synaptic plasticity? Is there a particular knowledge breakthrough, a “Holy Grail,” that you're seeking?

BONHOEFFER: Like always in science, that really depends on the level of detail with which one is satisfied. You can always, once you’ve understood something, go further and say, well, we’ve still not completely understood it, so let’s go to the next step. It’s difficult to say how far we’ve gotten. I’d say we’ve understood a couple of fundamental steps. We know, for instance, quite precisely which receptors in the brain are responsible for changes in the functional connections between nerve cells, the synapses; we also know the rules, when synapses get stronger and when they get weaker. All those things are quite well understood and have been elucidated over the last 10 to 15 years or so. But that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of stuff left to be discovered. Science is a never-ending story, which is partly also the fun of it.

In reference to the “Holy Grail,” at least in my personal lifetime or my scientific lifetime, what I would really like to be able to show is that it is really the changes in connections between nerve cells that cause information to be stored in the brain. It would be great to show for instance, that an animal learns something and you see that a thousand synapses change. Then, when you disable those thousand synapses, you see that the animal has forgotten exactly what it had learned before -- but nothing else.

Read More @ ScientificBlogging.com

Harvey on the Crisis of Capitalism

I figure this video is making the rounds so why not join the party and post it here as well. Below is an animated version of a talk by radical geographer David Harvey asking if it is time to look "beyond capitalism" towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane? Enjoy.

Marx as Sociologist of the Real

Over at Larval Subjects, Bryant has two great posts on Marx and Marxism. The first titled, “Is Marx a Sociologist of the Social?” is about Marx's theoretical potency, and well worth the read, and the second post, more of a brief afterthought, provides a perfect summary of Marxism’s “attempts to formulate a four-dimensional topography of the present that maps attractors, bifurcation points, or tendencies within the social field through which change might be produced.”

Despite my many disagreements with Bryant personally and his philosophical vocab generally, these two posts get right to the core of why I no longer argue about Marx with people: I find that a majority of people who dismiss Marx and his work have either failed to actually read him, or gleaned their interpretations of his work from critical comments read elsewhere and then projected onto Marx’s general theoretical significance. This is not to say that Jeffery Bell and the others commenting on Bryant’s blog haven’t read Marx, only that the people I have debated Marx with tend to show a real lack of engagement with his work.

Marx’s theoretical perspectives and tools changed much over the years leading up to the publication of Capital. Far from the ‘economic determinist’ that so many portray him as, Marx had a refined sensibility for complexifying his assertions with nuanced gestures towards non-human forces at work in human affairs and inserting terse lines of qualification in among his lengthy passages economic argumentation. Marx continually reworked his most basic themes and always used whatever available evidence to ground his thinking in concrete material processes. In fact, Marx was so sophisticated and anti-dogmatic that more considerate commentators like Steven Best have argued that Marx’s political ontology is actually more dynamic and reflexive than either Foucault or Habermas.

As only one example, it was not until Foucault’s later writings (and largely influenced by Deleuze) that he began to fashion a theory of human becomings (‘cultivation of the self’) adequate to the task of explaining political agency. Earlier in his career Foucault, probably under the lingering influence of structuralism, conceived of human agency as derivative and generated through tightly woven social processes. Whereas Marx, from early in his career, attempted to incorporate a realist conception of human being and becoming (something he later called “species-being”) into his more societal-systemic diagnostics. In short, Marx attempted to establish a very sophisticated realist micro-to-macro critical synthesis of available knowledge (the first printing of Capital was dedicated to Darwin) as a way to take up the politico-practical project of addressing human suffering, “toil” and injustice.

So I think Bryant is right to try to disrupt simplistic readings of Marx and to suggest that a closer reading might bring out the otherwise underappreciated depths of Marx’s decidedly realist political ontology. Here are a few quotations taken from both posts that represent for me the most important remarks:

"In Capital Marx does not appeal to either the social or class as an explanatory force. Indeed, class only appears very late in Capital. Rather, it seems to me that Marx practices an exemplary form of actor-network analysis throughout both Capital and Grundrisse. Marx seeks to explain society in the manner of a sociologist of associations rather than appeal to society to explain the world around us. The actants that Marx appeals to in this story are wage-labor, the money form, factories, trade routes, the availability of resources, various technologies, etc. Here class does not serve an explanatory function, but rather is an emergent effect of how wage labor functions. Class is something that comes into being through a variety of different processes.” [source]

“Marxism is an open theory. It doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, it doesn’t pretend to know everything. Like any good empiricism, it responds to new formations in the present and attempts to comprehend what these mean.”[source]

“Marxism attempts to formulate a four-dimensional topography of the present that maps attractors, bifurcation points, or tendencies within the social field through which change might be produced. By “four-dimensional” I am referring to the unfolding of time in the present. Through such a topography of tendencies it hopes to strategically intensify these tendencies through political practice.” [source]

My only issue with Bryant’s framing of Marx’s project is found in these two sentences (which I admittedly spliced together):

However, in my experience, Marxism is far less a political theory or a theory of revolution, than a way of approaching and analyzing the world around us…More than anything, Marxism is a way of analyzing the present and why it is the way that it is. Marxism is historico-material analysis. [source]

I think it’s too much to imply that Marxism, at least as expounded by Marx, was mostly analytical. Marx participated in several directly political organizations, wrote numerous articles intended as interventions into political debate, and did strongly advocate for revolution. The Communist Manifesto is a strictly political document. Therefore, we must admit that Marxism is both political theory and historical analysis (and Marx would argue ‘scientific’ endeavor). That is the raw genius of Marx: he brings together concrete analysis with practical engagement and moral sensibility. And this is why, unlike Bogost, I am a (neo)Marxist.

One other thing to note about Bryant’s post is that he briefly mentions DeLanda’s fierce critiques of Marx, which, quite frankly, have baffled me as well - since my reading of Marx understands him as a natural ally to DeLanda’s neo-materialist project. Why Manny, why reject The Karl?

*UPDATE: Also check out some of the fantastic remarks made by Jeffrey Bell and others in the comment sections of Bryant’s post here. From Jeffrey Bell: 

“Marx’s passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts where he describes how capitalism has transformed the work of our senses, impoverishing it to the least common denominator, still rings true in many ways and is one of my favorite passages. One can redescribe our contemporary media culture in along very similar lines. This is the Marx David Harvey is inspired by. The guiding question is how it is we can be productive in a way that is faithful to all the nuances and complexities of a life in a world of things and places.”

Nothing could be more fruitful than for speculative realists to engage the classical sociological works in order to potentially open up more practico-political discussions.

Toxic Alberta: Indigenous Groups Lead Struggle Against Tar Sands

From Democracy Now:

A group of lawmakers are calling on the Obama administration to take a closer look at the significant environmental impacts of a proposed massive pipeline that would carry Canadian tar sands oil 2,000 miles from northern Alberta all the way down to refineries in Texas and tankers off the Gulf Coast. Tar sands mining emits three times more greenhouse gas pollution than traditional oil and has come under heavy criticism from environmental and indigenous groups. Democracy Now!’s Mike Burke speaks to Clayton Thomas-Müller, a Canadian indigenous activist with the Indigenous Environmental Network:

"Indigenous People Are the First Ones Impacted" 
by Western-Driven Resource Extraction:

nationalism is fascism