Žižek on the Big Questions

Statements like the following taken from a recent interview place Slavoj Žižek firmly within the Speculative Realist camp:

“For the last few decades, at least in the humanities, big ontological questions - What is reality? What is the nature of the universe? - were considered too naive. It was meaningless to ask for objective truth. This prohibition on asking the big questions partly accounts for the explosion of popular science books. You read Stephen Hawking's books as a way to ask these fundamental, metaphysical questions. I think that era of relativism, where science was just another product of knowledge, is ending. We philosophers should join scientists asking those big metaphysical questions about quantum physics, about reality.”

My only objection here would be that we should be asking post-metaphysical (radically empirical) questions as opposed to strictly metaphysical questions. The difference makes all the difference.

Gleaning Place, Territory and Local Knowledge

image source

In my institutional days my primary academic interest was in critical and applied approaches to medical anthropology,  ethnoecology and political ecology (specifically with regards to environmentally resonant indigenous resistance movements). That was then, this is now – but I’m still very interested in those subjects, always trying to learn more about human behavior, identity, meaning-making, and how people carve out existences within particular biosocialcultural niches.

The ebook and paper linked below explicitly deal with understanding humans in particular environments and the different ways we understand our place in the world.

First, Johnson’s recently published book is a detailed study of traditional environmental knowledge  (TEK) among Gitksan, Witsuwit’en and Dene peoples. It is a fantastic resource for those interested in anthropological approaches to ecology and traditional (alternative) knowledge. It can be rather technical at times, but well worth the read for any of you anthro and environmental studies students.

Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path: Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape

by Leslie Main Johnson (2010)

In this volume, the author begins by examining key concepts, including ethnoecology, landscape and landscape ecology and a range of approaches that people have taken in approaching the domain of cultural knowledge of land and landscapes. In a series of chapters, she addresses: Gitksan ethnoecology, and the linkage of landforms and overall orientation systems to social structure and the storied landscape; Witsuwit’en landscape ethnoecology; people and landscape in northwest British Columbia, with focus on a key ecological type, the berry patch; the ethnoecology of Dene (Athapaskan speakers) in northern Canada, including Kaska and Gwich’in landscape knowledge, with consideration of commonalities and contrasts in Dene ethnoecology; named places; and the contrasts between indigenous landscape ethnoecology and the classification of habitats and landscapes in Western scientific thought, and the implications of these differences for how knowledge about landscape is presented and apprehended. In her concluding chapter, she reflects on landscape ethnoecology and on its potential to inform social and ecological sciences, land management, and contemporary political debates.

Read the Entire eBook @ Athabasca University Press

The second offering is from Stuart Elden, professor of political geography at Durham University, in the UK and author of the Progressive Geographies weblog. The paper is not open access, but, again, for those of you interested it looks to be an interesting read so you may want to access it somehow. [h/t to Peter Gratton of Philosophy in a Time of Error for bringing this to my attention]

Land, Terrain, Territory
by Stuart Elden

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded space’ or the state as a ‘bordered power container’, because both presuppose the two things that should be most interrogated, space and boundaries. Rather than boundaries being the distinction between place and space, or land or terrain and territory, boundaries are a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. Territory then can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control – the technical and the legal – must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.

Learn More @ Sage Journals Online

Capital Flows, Polity and Global Resonance Machines

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William E. Connolly is a politically science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. As a distinguished professor Connolly has received numerous awards for his writing on social theory and political commentary. Connolly's work fluidly integrates the theories of continental thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault with a post-Marxist penchant for political economics into an immanent and progressive theory of democratic contestation and engagement. His early book, Terms of Political Discourse received the Lippincott Award in 1999 given to an "outstanding work" still important "at least fifteen years after publication". His recent books include Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002); Pluralism (2005), and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). He is currently completing a book project entitled A World of Becoming.

The video below features a recent lecture delivered by Connolly as the keynote at the Watson Institute’s “Global Security Regimes in the Making?” conference. His talk was entitled, “Capital Flows, Sovereign Practices and Global Resonance Machines”.

In clear language, Connolly deploys the concept of the “resonance machine” in an attempt to elaborate his own framework for discussions about national security and global geopolitics. Connolly describes resonance machines as a complex, abstract, mobile, and unpredictable structures that unite disparate, but related political and social phenomena in a self-reinforcing network - the parts of which are in constant dialogue. For Connolly these ‘machines’ are “self-organizing” and have “no central agent in control”, but are assembled from a myriad of component parts which are deeply ‘interpenetrated.’” Moving from Hegel to Immanuel Wallerstein and Gilles Deleuze, Connolly touches on what he believes are some of the major antagonisms animating the field of international politics. This lecture provides a cogent example of how we can apply continental theory to political discourse in efforts to increase the scope and complexity of our political considerations. Enjoy:

I may have much more to say about Connolly’s model of "immanent naturalism" - which seems to be a variant of actualism - as I continue to get into his work, but I can say at this point I have some serious reservations about how he (following Deleuze) and others use the term ‘machines’ to denote the structural elements of complex living ecologies.

Despite this, I believe that Connolly's thinking displays a degree of flexibility and concreteness that is necessary in order to get past the use of traditional ideologies, bypass distracting philosophical arguments and begin engaging more practical and intelligence approaches to politics and social reality.

Let Freedom Reign

Relational Objects and Intensive Beings

Apologies up front, because this post is necessarily much too dense. My intention is to provide as precise account of my own ontological leanings as possible. I do so because, frankly, I’m tired of rendering problematics that are, for me, already solved or accepted as irrelevant in superfluous ways. Summer is almost over for hell’s sake! And there is much more to think about than models and metaphysics.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to read Levi Bryant’s post riffing on comments I made about the need to take relationality seriously. Of course, anyone reading Larval Subjects knows that Bryant addresses relations by positing objects manifesting qualities in relational ways. But the notion of virtual proper being as that which ‘withdraws’ from actuality remains for many a ghost. And, at least for me, the idea of real entities as being somehow “split” is an unnecessary specter in Levi’s otherwise brilliant ontology.

Alternatively, I remain convinced that we must instead seek out the source of individuality in the expressible properties and affective potency of actual objects. Virtuality, whether posited as the hidden potentials of temporal objects, or as the mathematically-real ‘signatures’ (or latencies) of dynamical systems, or as a crypto-Platonic ‘essence’ of intangible withdrawal, is a concept completely unnecessary for the task of coping with and encountering real objects in the world. And, to be sure, the consequential and relational nature of the encounters and copings between real entities precedes any attempts at modeling or codifying them.

Moreover, the contingent character of objects, assemblages, units, sparrows or NGOs is only ever encountered in contact with the affective capacities or powers embodied by actual entities. The capacities, or what Bennett calls ‘thing-power’, expressed by actual entities are unleashed from the immanent depths of the assembled temporal and relational properties of particular things. Thus coping with the individuality and force (affects) of particular entities requires attenuation to objects by objects through the capacities particular to specific entities. [And by ‘coping’ I mean something more general: as quasi-Heideggerian imperatives inherent to particular beings as such. For example, as humans we cope mainly biologically, but rocks cope mainly minerally.] Riding waves of and as contingent actualities we humans pre-consciously take up the tasks of encountering (‘being-with’) and coping by virtue of our particular and relative variant of being – i.e., the specific properties of our ‘being-towards’.

Conversely, “change”, then, is not something that needs to be explained by way of the operations of metaphysically withdrawn objects, as if temporality is one side of an epic binary waiting to be switched on. Rather, change is the inherent movement of all beings as primordial relations gathered up and extended as variously differentiated and distributed temporal properties. That is to say, change is not something that happens to objects or entities – but rather change is the intrinsic condition of the being and becoming of existing kosmic properties. Change is the very condition necessary for individuation to occur.

In fact, the very individuality that object-oriented thinkers want to objectify is a consequence and consequential (and therefore meaningful) effect of coalesced or assembled extensive properties intensively organized. As a result of their contingent and temporal nature, object-assemblages are forever vulnerable (and thereby relatively accessible) to other object-assemblages, and also to the more diffuse affective dynamics at play in any particular situation. And here I use “situation” as a technical term for the variable confluence of extensive properties and intensive relations.

The moral of this particular onto-story, then, is simply that if we are to take relationality seriously we must also take temporality seriously, and taking temporality seriously means recognizing the inherent ‘vulnerability’ and openness of entities as they actually exist. And any human project that purports to frame the things-in-themselves, that is to say any declared realist endeavor, must eventually let go of essentialist thinking (characterized by a belief in ‘essences’) and content itself with attenuating and mapping the actual contingencies revealed (or disclosed) through and to us by our very own relative natures. Only then does speculation lead to praxis.

Medical Agency and Plural Ontologies

Judith Farquhar (University of Chicago), "Plural Ontologies, Medical Agency: How Chinese Medicine Argues About Being":

SCA MEETING 2010 - Judith Farquhar from Cultural Anthropology on Vimeo.

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair at the University of Chicago. She conducts research on traditional medicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China. Anthropological areas of interest include medical anthropology; the anthropology of knowledge and of embodiment; critical theory and cultural studies; and theories of reading, writing, and translation.

Ray Brassier - The Pure and Empty Form of Death

The Pure and Empty Form of Death: Deleuze and Heidegger, by Ray Brassier:

In Difference and Repetition, the third synthesis of time is the privileged locus for an apocalyptic individuation whereby, in a striking inversion of Heidegger, the future 'ungrounds' the past and death become the subject of a time that splits the Self. For Deleuze, contra Heidegger, time, like death, is never 'mine': it is no-one's. The affirmation of eternal recurrence effects a mode of psychic individuation which transforms thought into a sign of impersonal death.

From ACTUAL VIRTUAL - APRIL 2006:

Watch More @ YouTube

IPCC Chairman Cleared of All Accusations

Just so everyone is quite clear, the much maligned chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri has been completely vindicated against charges of financial wrong-doings and conflicts of interest by an independent panel set up to investigate accusations made by prominent global warming deniers. The review of the IPCC chairman's financial relationships by respected auditors KPMG published today clearly reveals just how scrupulously and honest Pachauri has been since taking up the role of leading the widely respected UN research project.

For a while now, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri's "dodgy" business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest. Now it appears there is just one problem for denial-heads: the story was completely untrue. Pachauri’s total additional income over the 20 months reviewed by KPMG amounted to £45,000 from his salary at The Energy and Resources Institute, and a maximum of £2,174 in outside earnings related to his publications and board work. So much for Pachauri's "highly lucrative commercial jobs" amounting to "millions of dollars".

As per usual, however, truth matters little to the main oil and gas lobbyists involved – all conveniently presented in public as so-called “climate skeptics”. No doubt the corporate paid lobbyists will simply move on to the next target of slander and obfuscation in their efforts to discredit legitimate research and concern over global warming. By continuing their war against science and extending their well-funded campaigns of confusion denial-professionals hope to render the public debate over global warming unintelligible by bogged down discourse with irrelevant mud-slinging and anti-science propaganda – even as the scientific debate over human-accelerated global warming has been clear for several years.

Read the full KPMG report: here

I Got Love

As the immortal Marshall Mather’s once proclaimed, “it’s so good to be back!” I just arrived home from another incredible 10 days deep in the mountains of Jasper National Park. For those of you who don’t know, Jasper National Park is the largest wilderness park in the Canadian Rockies and an official World Heritage Site. The park encompasses more than 10,000 square km, and has more than 1,000 km in hiking trails.

I was there embedded with a team of researchers tracking and studying the movements, environs and life-ways of the two main herds of Woodland Caribou who live the Park. The Woodland Caribou is formally a “species at risk”, and recent surveys indicate that both Jasper herds are in decline. The northern herd is estimated at 150 animals. The south Jasper herd, numbering around 100, is down from counts of 450 surveyed in the early 1960's. Based on these trends, population models predict that the south Jasper woodland caribou herd could be completely gone in 40 years. It's difficult to determine why the woodland caribou are disappearing. Limited patches of high quality habitat, increased predation by wolves, climate change, and the direct and indirect effects of human activity are all factors – but tracking the life-ways of these amazing animals will help us understand more about the issues.

One highlight of the trip was a perilously close early morning encounter with a robust pack of wolves – resulting in our team setting off numerous flares to persuade our visitors to augment their journey and hunt elsewhere. I love those beasts! So much intensity.

There is something so invigorating about being in the mountains, walking through ancient forests in pursuit of wild species. I always try to imagine how our pursuits up there might somehow feel similar to those intrepid tribal hunters who once traversed those same forests. Of course, our adventure was strictly scientific and not at all propelled by the necessity to subsist in a wild world of precarious existence, but nonetheless…

What this latest trip really brought home, however, in just how much a need to think through and develop my central theoretical project: the pragmatic implications for an ontographic approach to the wilderness of being. As entities 'thrown' into the world we must find and make our way in a world full of wild, uncanny and strange beings and environments. We are confronted on all sides by forces, objects, flows and contexts which exceed our control, overflow our understandings and often try to destroy, devour or entangle us. Yet, there is also an abundance to Being that affords us the conditions from which we can build our lives. The rich flora and fauna of Being is simultaneously our mother, our matrix, and our calling. And everything hinges on how we explore this vast and intimate wilderness and what we can enact within it.

This manner of framing is at the core of everything I say, write and do. And I hope to develop my thoughts further whenever possible.

But, for now, I’m back in the city and looking forward to getting back to writing, blogging and all such networked activities. I have several topics I want to comment on, and a few good posts in draft I hope to post in the next few days, so please have patience as I get back into the electro-flow of things.

In the meantime, sit back, chill out and watch-listen to the resonant beauty expressed so passionately in the video below. It’s true – I GOT LOVE! Enjoy.

Of Objects and Assemblages

Jeremy at Eidetic Illuminations has a fantastic post up asking, "Are Cultures Objects?". He's raising some great questions about the efficacy of the Object-Oriented project. I want to touch briefly on a few issues he raises:

I think Jeremy pins down exactly what needs to be thought about when he asked, “…at what point can a set of relations be said to have turned into an object?” This is very important because the language he used actually offers a way forward. He asked ‘at what point’? – and the answer is: precisely at the point something becomes more rather than less differentiated from its background context.

But there’s the rub! No-thing is ever completely separate or differentiated from its context. Both Einstein and quantum physics argue exactly this. Things, or objects, are only ever relatively differentiated from the ecology within which they emerge. All things depend (or interdepend) on other things. But, as Bryant pointed out, not all things interdepend (my word) on other things at the same time. It is not that all things are directly related to each other, but that all things exist under certain circumstances and depend upon particular conditions and background relations. And, to return, it is the degree to which any coalesced assemblage becomes relatively differentiated from the life-conditions (form of life) within which it always partakes and co-creates that it can be said to be an ‘object’ unto itself.

Think embryos. Within the matrix of a womb an embryo can be seen to be an ‘object’ (or, rather, an assemblage) relatively distinct from its mother. But should you remove that embryo from its life-conditions (from the womb) it would certainly perish and de-assemble. Object-assemblages simply cannot be ‘removed’ from the matrix of reality, and any suggestion that ‘objects’ somehow have some special ontological status outside the relational contexts in which they dwell is not telling the whole-story. So unlike embryos that become foetuses and eventually leave the matrix of their mothers, WE cannot leave the womb of materiality and our deeply ecological reality – we depend on it. Just like every other object-assemblage that actually exists.

For me, somewhat following DeLanda (and he following Deleuze), all ‘objects’ are assemblages. Some assemblages are more ‘loose’ and some are more stable, but all such beasts always exist in relation. I think, contra Bogost and Morton, the concept of an assemblage can do more ‘work’ than the term object – at least the way DeLanda uses it – because ‘assemblage’ captures the simultaneous-ness of conjunctive and disjunctive relations and of whole/parts (mereology). It’s a more indicative term.

So at various points things either move towards becoming more rather than less of an object, or they disassemble, or deterritorialize, and become less of an object. Therefore, there must be certain “thresholds” (or certain “tipping points”) where assemblages ostensibly become individuals rather than continue to exist as a) multiplicities, or b) hybrid transgressors. And of course there are assemblage-things that hover ‘in between’ being an individual and a multiplicity (or ‘society’), such as certain organisms or ant colonies.

It is a matter of degree.

This thresholding of immanent reality is why it is more important, in my view, to always investigate the world of things in their particulars (with all their onto-specific idiosyncrasies). To truly respect the “strange mereology” of the world-itself (rather than of OOO), we have to respect the specific determining properties and characteristics of each and every situation or assemblage. [Isn’t this also exactly what ethnography teaches us about understanding the local?]

And this, incidentally, is for me the exact difference between ontography and ontology. Ontography speculatively maps particulars, while ontology speculatively abstracts generalities. Both are useful , but ontography must remain fundamental, in a way that mirrors how ethnography is more fundamental than ethnology.

With regards to culture, I have all but abandoned that concept myself - because, as you, Max and many others have pointed out, there are so many connotations at play with that term. ‘Is culture an object?’ Depends on what you are willing to objectify.

Certainly there are cultural objects. For example, a totem pole. A totem pole is a tree that has been transformed by humans and inscribed with symbolic meanings. Thus, the totem pole is an object-assemblage of wood, paint and symbolic representation which combine in such a way as to create a new ‘culturally’ recognizable object. But the question then becomes ‘what is the relationship of the totem pole to various other elements (object-assemblages)’?

Is there enough of a relationship between human beings, language, totem-poles (artifacts) and other objects that we can say that its assembly is itself an object? Has a particular crowd of distributed objects intensified its relations enough to cross the ‘threshold’ of multiplicity and become a unity? In what way does "it" act as an object? And the only way we judge that is relative to the context in which these things occur, and relative to the specific affects (capacities and powers) expressed by all the immanent and coalesced properties involved.

That is to say, we must do ontography rather than ontology to determine the specific properties and affect dynamics (my term) occurring in any particular context.

So, the problem I have with considering culture an ‘object’, or any given social milieu a distinct ‘society’, is that it seems to objectify situations involving intricately differentiated phenomena with amazingly diffuse relationships. Human populations exist among so much complexity that to draw boundaries around too wide a gathering of people, places and things is ‘imagine’ too much. At best, cultures are loose assemblages and not, in my opinion, intensive OR extensive enough to be ‘objects’ per se.