Realist Magic

I have a hard time understanding Tim Morton's notion of 'withdrawal' - suspecting somewhere subconsciously that his version is radically different than what Graham Harman proposes - but I certainly am intrigued. With the open access publication of his latest jazz-tinged literary artifact, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (html version found here) I hope to finally dive deep enough into the object-oriented aspects of Morton's thought to get some sort of grasp on what he trying to do. 

Here is a particularly meaty chunk from chapter one of the new book:

Imagine the cinder block all on its ownsome. A scandalous thought perhaps, maybe even impossible to think. The block is not just a blank lump waiting to be filled in by some “higher” object (overmining). The block is not a blob of something bigger or an assemblage of tinier things (undermining). The block is not made real by some medium (the “middle object”). The block is itself. It is specific. It is unique. We might as well think it as a specific, unique real thing. The block already has qualities, such as front, back, and so on. Yet these qualities are only ever aesthetic appearances, no matter whether there is any other “observer” around to see. Yet these appearances are real aspects of the block: it isn’t a pyramid, and it doesn’t have a swan’s neck. The object itself is riven from the inside between its essence and its appearance. This can’t simply mean that the cinder block is a lump of substance that has a certain shape and color and that those are its accidents. We have already ruled that out. It must mean that in itself the block (essence) is also a non-block (appearance). 

The conclusion seems magical, but it’s a very ordinary kind of magic. It requires no special features, no supervenient soul or mind or animating force of any kind. It requires that our cinder block have no hidden material squirreled away inside it, no extra folds or hidden pockets of any kind. It only requires that the block exist. There is a block, whose essence is withdrawn. Withdrawn doesn’t mean hard to find or even impossible to find yet still capable of being visualized or mapped or plotted. Withdrawn doesn’t mean spatially, or materially or temporally hidden yet capable of being found, if only in theory. Withdrawn means beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or extrapolation. You could explode a thousand nuclear bombs and you would not reveal the secret essence of the cinder block. You could plot the position and momentum of every single particle in the block (assuming you could get around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) and you wouldn’t discover the withdrawn essence of the block. Ten of the world’s greatest playwrights and film directors (let’s say Sophocles, Shakespeare, Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Akira Kurosawa and David Lynch just for starters) could write horrifying, profound tragedies and comedies and action movies about the block and still no one would be closer to knowing the essence of the block.

Something tells me if I can understand the passage above I might just be able to pick up what Tim is putting down...

Forget Baudrillard?

“The secret of theory is that truth doesn’t exist. You can’t confront it in any way. The only thing you can do is play with some kind of provocative logic. Truth constitutes a space that can no longer be occupied. The whole strategy is, indeed, not to occupy it, but to work around it so that others come to occupy it. It means creating a void so that others will fall into it.” 

- Jean Baudrillard, Forget Baudrillard (interview with Sylvère Lotringer, 1977)

Only A Matter of Time

“Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.” - Thomas J. Watson

Time just isn't what it used to be. It goes without typing that I have been neglecting this little corner of the interwebs for some time now. Silence has replaced the ramblings, and little has been offered in terms of engagement with other bloggers. So it has been, and so it goes..

 Yet I can hardly offer anything resembling an apology for such neglect. Over the last 12 months my personal life has never been richer or more intense. I have learned much and laughed more – which, most situations being considered, is justification enough for any such absence. I now know just how easy it can be to ignore ‘cyberspace’ in favor of the exquisite moments, challenges and pains afforded in meat-space. The Real intervenes in so many interesting and significant ways.

I won't bore readers with too much detail of what amounts to fairly conventional existence, but I will confess that in 2012 I radically altered my lifestyle and decreased the amount of paid employment I was involved with in order to reset and refocus on family, my own health and personal development. I began to work less, play more, and improved all of my significant relationships by changing how I expended my energies, and by completely reorganizing my diet and daily activities. This past year was indeed a major turning point in my life.

Among the many changes was, as many of you may know, a return to combat sports. In my early thirties I had moved away from high level training and competition as my vocation/career and family life evolved (see here for more detail). But in the past year I returned to full-time training in martial-arts and have competed and won a muay thai (มวยไทย) kickboxing championship and fought and won in front of large crowds at local mixed martial-arts (MMA) events. At 37 years old I never could have imagined I would fight at such a high level again, let alone winning championships and garnering the attention of the sports community.

The decision to return to combat sports was without a doubt the major catalyst for so many other changes in my life: entailing a dramatic shift in my sleeping patterns, diet and the amount of exercise I engaged in – all of which has positively impacted my ability to be a husband, father, friend and citizen. The only major downside of this reprioritization has been a severe decrease in attention to more intellectual pursuits, including reading and writing blogs. Pretty much all I have been able to keep up with is twitter (which I do enjoy), and these interactions more often only lead to rather superficial exchanges on ideas and arguments. This low grade engagement with academics and theoreticians has been the most disappointing side-effect of my new lifestyle.

During this quasi-hiatus from all things philosophical/theoretic I have continued to read widely, and have been working in isolation to refine many of my thoughts on a variety of issues. Some of this new ‘work’ has led me in unexpected directions, much of which I hope to share on this site in the near future.

I also began reading more fiction (classics and notable contemporary novels, as well as a considerable amount of graphic novels and science fiction) as a way to ‘come down’ after particularly intense training sessions – which is something I almost never allowed myself the opportunity for prior to this past year. I had always preferred my fiction via film and 'serious' comics, but I am coming around to the reality that novels and invented worlds have as much to teach me as speculative theory or dry academic factoids.

All these confessions and banalities are simply to say that without further pomp or circumstance I intend to shift gears and return to regular blogging. At this point my intention is to just start posting again. I figure I don’t need to be overly meditative or precise with my blogging, but rather I just need to start writing and sharing stuff. So I’m not sure just how much substance the next few posts will have, or if they will only amount to short commentaries, or sharing resources, or become promissory notes to the many friends and acquaintances who I already owe responses. But my hope is if I can begin to develop the habit of posting regularly it will only be a matter of time before I post something worth talking about.

#confessions

First Nations Rising?

"When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is, for the people and for each segment of the population, the most sacred of rights and the most fundamental of duties." 

- Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 24 June 1793

Hundreds of First Nations people gathered yesterday for Idle No More, a national day of protest against the Canadian federal government's Bill C-45 (the so-called "Jobs and Growth Act") which intentionally attempts to supersede and violate long-standing treaty rights in oder to promote 'ecnomic growth' and private business interests.

The omnibus legislation contains changes to the Indian Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act impacting all areas of land and water, and effectively removing all legal grounds for First Nations communities to determine what happens within their territories.

Crystal Lameman with the Beaver Lake First Nation argues that the Harper government has ignored its duty to consult with First Nations on the changes:

"In our treaty, it says that we will always be able to go to the land to subsist, but when you are pulling fish from the lake that have cancers hanging off of them, and that the migration pattern of the Woodland caribou are being affected, that's our basic human rights being violated."

Protests were also held in other Canadian cities including Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto.



 SAMSON CREE FIRST NATION PRESS RELEASE:

“Pipes will be lifted in support of Idle No More; this pipe ceremony will signify peace between two Nations and with the Creator. The presence of the pipe signifies the pipe laws of gentleness, compassion and mutual respect.”

The Cree of Maskwacis will be holding a pipe ceremony and peaceful demonstration on Hwy 2A at Maskwacis. For that purpose, a portion of the main highway between the Highway 611 West and Pe Sakastew Correctional Centre will be blocked between 11:15 am and 12:15 pm. 

Alternate routes will be posted for those travelers who are not able to stay and support the peaceful demonstration.  

We are taking this opportunity, coinciding with 12th hour of the 12th day of December 2012, to bring awareness to First Nations’ opposition to legislation proposed by the Harper government. 

We also want people to bring attention to the hunger strike started on Tuesday, December 11, 2012, by Chief Theresa Spence, Attawapiskat First Nation, a First Nation in northern Ontario, who has ‘vowed to ‘die’ for her people’. She has been quoted as saying: “I am willing to die for my people because the pain is too much and it’s time for the government to realize what it’s doing to us.”  

In the past term of office, the Harper government has introduced several pieces of legislation in the House of Commons and the Senate which will significantly impact the lives of First Nations’ people across Canada. Not only has this legislation been introduced without any real participation by the people affected by the legislation, it is being ‘fast-tracked’ through the House of Commons and the Senate.  

When First Nations people agreed to share their lands and resources with ‘newcomers’, First Nations could not have foreseen that, in time, not only would First Nations become landless, but that First Nations would have to conform to the ideologies, and world views of the ‘visitors’. That time has come to pass. Despite the adoption of the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, by the United Nations and subsequent ratification in Canada, Canada is unilaterally passing laws governing the First Nations without the free, prior and informed consent of the First Nations people.

The bills before the House of Commons and the Senate directly undermines First Nations’ right of self-determination, and subjugates First Nations people to a legal and political system that has not served the collective interests of First Nations.  

In Samson Cree Nation’s letter to the Member of Parliament for Wetaskiwin, Samson Cree Nation lobbied the MP to reject the proposed legislation, bring these matters to the grass roots people, and to obtain First Nations support for legislation that will directly affect the lives and future of First Nations before endorsing it in the House of Commons.

#IdleNoMore

Science of Cruelty?

Breaking Barriers (1986. Washington, D.C):



Oh what low creatures we are with all our rational self-confirming calculations. Better will we be when we wake up to the animal within. 

#inhumanism

Tom Sparrow on Sensation and Vulnerability

If you haven’t read Tom Sparrow’s work on carnal phenomenology and sensation yet you should do so immediately. Sparrow’s lucid explications of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Alphonso Lingis, Merleau-Ponty and others dealing in theories of embodiment and aesthetics are razor sharp and provocative - and his prose is pure a joy take in. Do yourself a favor: read him.

I recently returned to an article of Tom's called ‘Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis’, in which Tom clarifies Lingis’ substantial (if currently underrated) contribution to understanding both the primacy of sensation and what I refer to as ‘ontological vulnerability’ or the fundamental openness of things. Tom compares and contrasts Lingis’ views on embodied subjectivity and the flesh of the world with those who Lingis draws upon most – his predecessors in every sense – on the way to suggesting what could easily be held up as a radical philosophy of corporeality. The paper is substantial.

Below are some of the more interesting passages from the text:

Sensation intervenes in our practice and lets slip our hold on things and on ourselves. To deny its interruptive power is to deny the subordination of consciousness to the world of corporeal experience, to assert the primacy of human access to the sensuous world which we live from. It is to pretend that the phenomenal world has never once collapsed its appearance and asserted its fantastic weight upon our bodies…

There is a type of intelligibility nascent in sensibility, an intelligibility that is affective before it is intelligible and vital before it is rational. We might call this, following Straus, an alingual animal intelligibility. It is a pre-rational intelligence that we humans share with the other fleshy beings. We, as human-animal subjects, are already subjected to a sensuous medium that preempts the judgments and rational discourses we have either invented or acquired in order to master this medium and attempt to break off from the animal kingdom.

The circuit of rational discourse which is developed and deployed, the technological and sociocultural manufacture that we toil over to wrest ourselves free from the demands of our biological composition, and the community of modern individuals that each one of us is born into—all of this is preempted by our encounter with other bodies, intruder or seducer bodies, and the appeals they make on our own. This singular community of sustenance and separation is a community which is marked by the exposure of oneself to another in the sensuous medium. My flesh is nothing other than your flesh. But my body is at the same time exposed to your body, the body of some animal, and the totality of objects which are folded into the levels of the world.

Read More: Here

Tom Sparrow is a philosopher currently teaching at Slippery Rock University. His forthcoming book, Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology is highly anticipated, and he blogs at Plastic Bodies. I have also discussed his work previously here, here and here.

UPDATE: Tom just announced he will be publishing a new collection of essays called Levinas Unhinged with Zero Books. The book will explore what Tom describes as “the darker side” of Levinas’ philosophy, and will attempt to reach out to a new Levinas readership "by downplaying the usual slogans and paying more attention to aspects of Levinas that are typically overshadowed by his ethics, the face, the other, etc." Learn more: here.

Merleau-Ponty on Truth and Experience in Metaphysics

I often argue with people about the importance of reading through the correlationist tendencies in Merleau-Ponty's work in order to grasp the more radical conclusions of his philosophy of immanence and embodied experience. It is true that Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we can only know the world as it is 'for-us', but it is equally true and important that the world and our knowing it are not two, ontologically speaking, but rather deeply intertwinned realities ultimately generated from the same ontological matrix, or Flesh of reality. That is, we may know the world in human terms, but we do so intimately because our embodied perceptions (and sensations) are not ontologically 'other than' that which we seek to know. We are made of the same stuff.

From Merleau-Ponty’s Sense and Non-Sense:

“The germ of universality or the “natural light” without which there could be no knowledge is to be found ahead of us, in the thing where our perception places us, in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us. Metaphysics begins from the moment when, ceasing to live in the evidence of the object – whether it is the sensory object or the object of science – we apperceive the radical subjectivity of all our experience as inseparable from its truth value. It means two things to say that our experience is our own: both that it is not the measure of all imaginable being in itself and that it is nonetheless co-extensive with all beings of which we can form a notion. This double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics: I am sure that there is being – on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being-for-me. When I am aware of sensing, I am not, on the one hand, conscious of my state and, on the other, of a certain sensuous quality such as red or blue – but red or blue are nothing other than my different ways of running my eyes over what is offered to me and of responding to its solicitation… Metaphysics is the deliberate intention to describe this paradox of consciousness and truth, exchange and communication, in which science lives and which it encounters in the guise of vanquished difficulties or failures to be made good but which it does not thematize. From the moment I recognize that my experience, precisely insofar as it is my own, makes me accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the world and to others, all the beings which objective thoughts placed at a distance draw singularly nearer to me . . . Metaphysical consciousness has no other objects than those of experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them as all settled, as consequences with no premises, as if they were self evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing.” 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 93-94.

Isabelle Stengers on Cosmopolitics

h/t Footnotes2Plato

DeLanda on Cosmological Syntheses, Subjectivity and New Materialism

Open Humanities Press has made available the latest book in the New Metaphysics series titled, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies: online and free here.

The following excerpts are from chapter two, “Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds” - Interview with Manuel DeLanda:

Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev’s terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.  

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze & Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.

... 

I surely reject the idea that morphogenesis needs any “mind” to operate. I also reject the neo-Kantian thesis of the linguisticality of experience. To assume that human experience is structured conceptually is to dehistoricize the human species: we spent hundreds of thousands of years as a social species, with a division of labor (hunters, gatherers) and sophisticated stone tool technology. Language is a relatively recent acquisition. Are we to assume that those ancient hunter gatherers lived in an amorphous world waiting for language to give it form?

...
 

A theory of the subject is absolutely necessary but it must be based on Hume, not on Kant: subjective experience not as organized conceptually by categories but as literally composed of intensities (of color, sound, aroma, flavor, texture) that are given structure by habitual action. Recent developments in artificial intelligence will help with this: while the old symbolic school is deeply Kantian, the new connectionist school (based on neural nets that are not programmed but trained) points to a way out. Current neural net designs are at the level of insect intelligence but they already suggest how an insect protosubjectivity can emerge from a dynamic of perceived intensities. We need to extend this to the subjectivity of mammals and birds, and work our way up to human subjectivity. The political implication of this can be phrased as follows: rejecting the linguisticality of experience (according to which every culture lives in its own world) leads to a conception of a shared human experience in which the variation comes not from differences in signification (which is a linguistic notion), but of significance (which is a pragmatic one). Different cultures do attribute different importance, relevance, or significance to different things because their practices (not their minds) are different.

Read the rest of the interview here.  h/t Adam Robbert

God and the Organism: A Dialogue with John Protevi

John Protevi is one of the most stimulating cross-paradimatic philosophers working today. His profound exploration of the possible intersections between Deleuze, cognitive science and dynamical systems theories is a powerful example of how empirical research and speculative philosophy can fit together to illuminate the complexly of human existence on this planet. His book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (2009) is one of my all-time favourites. Learn more about John's work at his website: here      

From Christopher Long's Digital Dialogue series:

 

Digital Dialogue 56: God and the Organism from Christopher Long on Vimeo.

Description: John Protevi, Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University, joins me for episode 56 of the Digital Dialogue, God and the Organism. John's work focuses on Continental phenomenology and, more specifically, on contemporary French philosophy. In addition to his many publications on embodied cognition and French philosophy, his book, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, came out with University of Minnesota Press in 2009, and he has another book, Life, Earth, War: Deleuzean Interventions, forthcoming with Minnesota Press.

h/t dmf