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

Differing Objects: Formally Ungraspable, Ontologically Vulnerable?

Over at Attempts at Living blogger extraordinaire and fellow post-nihilist pragmatist Arran briefly mentions the strong affinities between Tim Morton’s ‘realist magic’ and the work of Jean Baudrillard via the following two quotes.

Morton:

“An object is not an illusion. But it is not a non-illusion. Much more threatening than either is what is the case, namely an object that is utterly real, essentially itself, whose very reality is formally ungraspable. No hidden trapdoors, just a mask with some feathers whose mystery is out in front of itself, in your face. A miracle. Realist magic. This all means that the skills of the literary critic and the architect, the painter and the actor, the furniture maker and the composer, the musician and the software designer can be brought to bear on the workings of causality.” [Realist Magic 2013]

And Baudrillard:

“Objects are such that, in themselves, their disappearance changes them. It is in this sense that they deceive us, that they generate illusion. But it is in this sense too that they are faithful to themselves, and we must be faithful to them: in their minute detail, in their exact figuration, in the sensuous illusion of their appearance and connectedness. For illusion is not the opposite of reality, but another more subtle reality which enwraps the former kind in the sign of its disappearance.” [in 'Photographies']

Both theorists posit an absolute absence (withdrawal or disappearance) of giveness in human perception, and both gentlemen suggest we stop bitching about this absence and start attended more to the miraculous illusions they cast out. For Morton the ‘ungraspability’ of things is a feature of the causal structure of reality, whereas for Baudrillard the reality of illusion is simply part and parcel with what reality has generally and ultimately become.

What both men don’t seem to consider, however, is the ontic difference that makes a difference between epistemic relation (conceptual or formal grasp-ability) and structural relation (physical or material grasp-ability). Not all relations, encounters and contacts are enacted viz. the 'withdrawl' of formal accountability or the disappearance of unmediated sign connection. Some interactions are more direct and consequential, at least in terms of structural composition and operational efficacy. This ontological vulnerability is prior to the kind of thetic coding, logico-linguistic recursion, or formal iconic representations that are at the core of the types of interpretation or “translation” OOO rightfully argues is inadequate for the total comprehension of things. Without a fundamental ontic openness and affective potency intimacy is impossible, and alterity is ineffectual and incomprehensible.

Instead, I argue human cognition and signification is a relatively unique complex and emergent affair, and perhaps should not be taken as the quintessential kind of relation in the cosmos. Nonhuman objects are often co-determining assemblies (ecologically embedded, indebted and enacted) interfacing in non-reflexive, non-thetic, non-psychological ways governed by their material and operational structures and capacities. To reduce the particularity of object-encounters, or to project some sort of anthropomorphic specular theory of reflexive distance onto objects universally, is to be ontographically unfaithful to the contingent nature of things.

I think the easy descent into panpsychism (or rather pan-epistemology, as the onto-theologizing of representational cognition) that certain strains of object-orientation seem to require is a major flaw of an otherwise fascinating philosophical adventure. [also see here]

UPDATE: In the comment section of a great post on Laruelle and Luhmann Levi Bryant had this to say:

What I call “alien phenomenology”, following Ian Bogost, is an analysis of how beings, both human and non-human, correlate to the world around them, e.g., how does a bat experience the world? On the other hand, I take it that the various forms of OOO are pan-correlationisms. What does that mean? Harman, Morton, Bogost, and myself all argue that no entity has access to any other entity; though we argue this in different ways. Rather, each entity distorts other entities in relating to them. Seen within this framework, the claim is not so much that correlationism is false, as that it is wrong to claim that there’s something unique about the human correlation. This is what pan-correlationism means: that there is as much a correlationist structure with how the cat or computer relates to the world about it, as the human. 

There are, I think, two key points here. First, we must take care never to reduce entities to their correlations. In relating to my cat, I no doubt reduce/distort it in a number of ways, but my cat can’t be reduced to how it is given to me or what it is for me. Second, we must attend to the frame of reference in which claims are being made about another thing or observe the observer. Which observer are we talking about? Jonah? A scientific institution? Insurance companies? Cats? Etc.

Wouldn't these “pan-correlationisms” found at the core of the various forms of OOO also be considered to be variants of panpsychism (or pan-epistemology)? If all objects have a 'alien phenomenology' and all encounters are ‘translations’ then do all object interactions have some sort of processual mind-like quality to them? This seems to me to be universalizing cognitive experience such that all reality operates hermeneutically. And pushed far enough I believe pan-correlationism would lead strait to Idealism. Am I missing something here?

Perspective, Plurality and Pragmatism?

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In this age of dissolution – a general unweaving of the fabric of life and certainty – there is an increasing need to design radically new sensitivities and complex relations. In short, we must voluntary evolve more adaptive ecologies of being, knowing and acting. But what resources will be afforded? What types of cartographies will be required to navigate this hyper-present? And where shall we begin?

My answer to the crucial question of origins lies somewhere between radical phenomenological practice and post-formal constructive logic - or, rather, in their collision. We must start from our animal experience and then extrapolate the contours of an immanent, impinging and impending ecology, context or wilderness of Being, upon which the drama of our phantasies must be written. The clamor of human and nonhuman agents, actants and assemblages must then be dealt with pragmatically and in earnest lest we fail to adapt and then perish.

Rosenthal, Sandra B. (2005) ‘The Ontological Grounding of Diversity: A Pragmatic Overview’. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 19, Number 2, pp. 107-119:

The uprootedness of experience from its ontological embeddedness in a natural world is at the core of much contemporary philosophy, which, like pragmatism, aims to reject foundationalism in all its forms: positions that all hold, in varying ways, that there is a bedrock basis on which to build an edifice of knowledge, something objective that justifies rational arguments concerning what is the single best position for making available or picturing the structure of reality as it exists independently of our various contextually set inquiries. There can be no nonperspectival framework within which differences—social, moral, scientific, etc., can be evaluated and resolved. These positions may, like pragmatism, focus on the pluralistic, contextualistic ways of dealing with life, on the role of novelty and diversity, on a turn away from abstract reason to imagination, feeling, and practice, and on the need to solve the concrete problems of political, social, and moral life. However, pragmatism, in rejecting foundationalism and its respective philosophic baggage, does not embrace the alternative of antifoundationalism or its equivalent dressed up in new linguistic garb. Rather, it rethinks the nature of foundations, standing the tradition on its head, so to speak, and this rethinking incorporates the ontological grounding of diversity.

This rethinking, which incorporates the essentially perspectival nature of experience and knowledge, goes hand in hand with pragmatism's radical rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge. All knowledge and experience are infused with interpretive aspects, funded with past experience. And all interpretation stems from a perspective, a point of view. Knowledge is not a copy of anything pregiven, but involves a creative organization of experience that directs the way we focus on experience and is tested by its workability in directing the ongoing course of future activities. In this way, experience and knowledge are at once experimental and perspectival in providing a workable organization of problematical or potentially problematical situations. Not only are perspectives real within our environment, but without them there is no environment.

Further, our worldly environment incorporates a perspectival pluralism, for diverse groups or diverse individuals bring diverse perspectives in the organization of experience. The universe exists independent of our intentional activity, but our worldly environment is inseparable from our meaning or intending it in certain ways, and these ways are inherently pluralistic. However, such pluralism, when properly understood, should not lead to the view that varying groups are enclosed within self-contained, myopic, limiting frameworks or points of view, cutting off the possibility of rational dialogue, for two reasons. First, perspectives by their very nature are not self-enclosed, but open onto a community perspective, and second, perspectival pluralism provides the very matrix for rational dialogue and ongoing development. And it is within the core of human selfhood that the primordial ontological embeddedness of diversity within the very nature of, indeed as constitutive of, human experience can be found.

For pragmatism, mind, thinking, and selfhood are emergent levels of activity of ontologically "thick" organisms within nature. Meaning emerges in the interactions among conscious organisms, in the adjustments and coordinations needed for cooperative action in the social context. In communicative interaction, individuals take the perspective of the other in the development of their conduct, and in this way there develops the common content that provides community of meaning and the social matrix for the emergence of self-consciousness. In incorporating the perspective of the other, the self comes to incorporate the standards and authority of the group; there is a passive dimension to the self Mead calls the "me." Yet, the individual responds as a unique center of activity; there is a creative dimension to the self, the "I" (Rosenthal 2005:107).

Questions? Suggestions? Concerns?

Things Will Not Be So Easy

I truly enjoy how hollywood makes profit by projecting the fears of its own established cultural elites. I don't even mind when such profits are made by making a caricature of the very real and raw impulses motivating many of us who are increasingly organizing to confront those elites - impulses rooted in an organic sense of complete disgust with a mainstream that is fundamentally a manufactured pseudo-civilization with corporate oligarchs and govern-mental disfunction firmly at its core.

I just watched the following trailer for the new film "The East": "a story centered on contract worker who is tasked with infiltrating an anarchist group, only to find herself falling for its leader." The film features actors Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsgård and Brit Marling, and directed by Zal Batmanglij. The film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2013.

The film's co-writer and star Brit Marling said the following in relation to the film: "Multinational corporations are outside of the purview of any nation-state. These are the entities that are shaping and running the world... The modern anarchy movement is about rebelling against the corporate structure."

Check it out:



Any comments?

#darkestbeforethestorm 

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.