When your long-retired parents invite you (and family and sibs) on a Mediterranean cruise, do you

(a) jump at the opportunity,

(b) graciously accept (realizing, for instance, that this may be one of the last opportunities for us to reconnect with the full nuclear-plus family, or what’s left of it),

(c) bite your tongue (knowing, for instance, what a jet-lagged toddler will be like on one of those mega-crowd eating-and-gawking extravaganzas), then graciously accept, or

(d) politely decline?

We graciously accepted. This blog will most likely be on hiatus until the second week of June.

No related posts.

Clearly, the way for a philosopher to get press these days is not to work on panpsychism, which is among the most challenging and philosophically trenchant (and ecologically relevant) positions to be revived in the recent “return to metaphysics,” but to work on — and publish materials by — the Unabomber.

This reminds me of David Ray Griffin, whose ceaseless work on behalf of a Whiteheadian process-relational metaphysics never made it far out of the intellectual playpen where such ideas tend to reside, but once he became a leading proponent of the 9-11 Truth Movement, he suddenly gathered large crowds — and powerful detractors.

(In our — academics’ — defense, those ideas have traditionally filtered down from that playpen — when they were good ideas — in something like a “trickle down theory” of ideas. The internet has exploded the ivory tower, an explosion still occurring in slow motion rather like the famous explosion in the desert of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point; see below. But if I didn’t believe that ideas had power, I wouldn’t be wasting your or my own time.)

There is something about the double lives of philosophers, and the relationship between ideas and action, that Skrbina’s case, like so many others’, points toward. As did Zabriskie Point…

Related posts:

1. Good news, bad news…
2. NT5: Shaviro on panpsychism
3. biosemiotics news

I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.”

It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker did a fabulous job editing it.

She and I co-wrote the introductory chapter, which can be read here.

I don’t yet have an electronic version of my closing chapter, “Religious (Re)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature,” but I’d be happy to share a pre-publication version of it upon request. An excerpt of it can be found here.

Related posts:

1. Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature
2. Religion & the Japanese tragedy
3. spiritualizing science

Now that a very busy semester has ended, I can return to the constructive speculative-metaphysical strand of this blog, in which I work out the process-relational philosophy I’ve tentatively labelled Ecosophy-G. A suitable acronym for this project might be “pre-G” (process-relational ecosophy-G), pronounced “pree-jee,” with the “pre” also indicating that the philosophy is a form of pre-articulation, a work in progress, and the “ge” referring, among other things, to the “Ge-” of geography, geophilosophy, and geode.

The “process-relational” moniker is intended, in part, to ally it with all manner of process philosophies, especially the Whiteheadian and the Peircian, and relational ontologies, including Buddhist, feminist, and ecological ones. As an “ecosophy,” it explicitly places itself alongside the ecosophies of Arne Naess, Felix Guattari, and the Deleuzo-Guattarians plying their onto-ethico-aesthetic philosophical trades. This makes it “applied” rather than “pure” philosophy, a way of thinking informing a manner of living that takes account of the world and its potentials and its capacities, but starts from one’s own emplacement within the contextual field of those relations.

As a speculative realism (alongside others, including object-oriented ontologies, which take a very different strategy toward similar or overlapping ends), it takes the actuality of the world seriously and speculates about its construction, the rules or patterns shown in its workings, and the capacities enabled by those patterns. It speculates in the sense that it formulates concepts to account for situations that are always somewhat new, with the world changing in front of our eyes; and so the concepts must always be somewhat new.

And as a speculative pragmatism (a term that allies it with the speculative pragmatisms of Brian Massumi, Robert Cummings Neville, Sandra Rosenthal, and the “pragmaticism” of C. S. Peirce), it takes ideas about the world seriously, but is more interested in what those ideas do than in what they stand for in themselves.

Ultimately, it is intended also to help me make sense of the kinds of empirical phenomena I’ve been studying for the last couple of decades or more (in fact, since my Master’s work on ecology, culture, and identity in post-Chernobyl Ukraine and elsewhere). These are phenomena in which the relationship between human experience and the extra-human world is at stake, undergoes profound change, or affords the possibility of radical reimagination in the midst of deep conflicts of interpretation.

One entry point into Ecosophy-G is the one that is closest to what is central to our own experience as human bodyminds. Let’s start with that here.

Finding a foothold in experience

In starting from one’s own emplacement within actual relations, pre-G looks for a foothold in actual experience, because experience is the form of actuality that it takes as being central to things. This focus on experience is something that pre-G shares with Whiteheadian, Peircian, Buddhist, and many other process-relational and pragmatic(ist) and liberationist philosophies.

It finds that foothold in something that, for starters, we might call “the moment.”

In Ecologies of the Moving Image, I argue that the central, median-level unit in our experience of a film is the kind of thing captured by words like “moment,” “scene,” and “episode.” Episodes are only “episodic” in the context of a longer narrative arc, with that narrative constituting the way a series of secondnesses (experiential encounters or events) are connected together into thirdness (meaningful coherence). Scenes are the kinds of moments that arise within a form of experience that is witnessed but not (particularly) participated in — such as watching a film.

Moments, on the other hand, are basic units of experiential coherence, attaining toward a unity within the multiplicity of elements that make them up and the ambiguity of those elements’ involvement in them (since those elements usually precede the moment and continue on after it has ended).

I should mention something about the relationship between moments and “actual occasions.” The latter, in Whitehead’s system, are atomic units making up the process structure of the universe. They are microcosmic units, and their unity and atomicity is an issue that requires more elaboration. There is debate about whether, or to what extent, atomicity is required by Whitehead’s system and how it compares with others (such as Bergson’s or, in some ways, James’s and Peirce’s) that take process to be more continuous in nature. This problem of atomicity-versus-continuity is one that likely requires a complex resolution, and is perhaps akin to  physicists’ conundrums with particle-wave duality.

In any case, a moment of our experience is something occurring at a mesocosmic level and is already much more complex than Whitehead’s actual occasions — complex enough that atomicity of that sort necessarily eludes it.

(The “mesocosmic” level is that where one finds the entities that Whitehead called “societies,” that is those mega-occasions, so to speak, made up of the coordinated activity of many actual occasions, in which a certain guiding unity is felt or experienced. Human bodyminds, to the extent that these are unified continuities of experience, are such societies. Other organisms, as well as rocks and non-sentient entities, are also particular kinds of societies, different in significant respects from humans and from each other, but not entirely different in principle.)

Understanding a moment of such experience is useful for the bearer of it insofar as it allows one to get a handle on what is happening here and now and what one can do within this set of happenings. Isolating or slowing down a moment allows us to analyze more precisely what the range of action is for me here, now.

It also enables us, ultimately (with dedicated practice), to begin to see the nature of experience as a dynamic flow characterized by the mutual co-arising of subjectivity and objectivity. And, in turn, a more accurate understanding of the nature of reality contributes to better engagements with that reality.

The remainder of this post will focus on this co-arising of subjectivity and objectivity. A future post will deal with the question of what it is that experiences and what does not. Other issues will come to the fore afterward.

Objectivation, subjectivation, and withdrawal

As mentioned, for Ecosophy-G experience is a dynamic flow — or, really, something more like a dynamic oscillation, an alternating-current kind of percolation or interactive exchange — characterized by the mutual co-arising of subjectivity and objectivity.

In this sense, the object-oriented ontologists’ term “object” — the designation for all actually existing entities — is not very helpful for pre-G. But then neither is a “subject-oriented ontology” — the rival idea that everything is a subject — which is how Levi Bryant characterizes Didier Debaise’s metaphysics. (I’m not sure to what extent Debaise’s philosophy actually qualifies as that, though it does appear to focus on the subjective pole of experience; see “The subjects of nature“–pdf warning.)

Rather, for pre-G, everything is object-subjectivation (or subject-objectivation), and any attempt to separate out one or the other of the poles of this dynamic is not particularly helpful. Object-subjectivation is a process characterized by a vector structure that moves, in a sense, from the emergent-subject to the emergent-objects and back, with the subject-superject then becoming object to the next set of arisings.

Neither a subject nor an object stand still, except insofar as their movement is slow enough for another emergent-subject that in the perception of that other the first appears to be standing still. Ultimately, there are no subjects or objects; only subjectivation and objectivation, which co-arise at the microcosmic level of an actual occasion. The effects of this microcosmic process create the appearance of subjects and objects at the mesocosmic level to those operating at that level that misperceive themselves and others as “standing still.”

Subjects and objects, then, are misperceptions or misapprehensions. Subjectivation and objectivation, on the other hand, are real, conjoined microcosmic processes that elicit effects at mesocosmic levels. Those effects, in turn, build emergent structural patterns that are real. These, too, are patterns of subject-objectivation made up of coordinated sub-patterns of subject-objectivation.

Back to the moment, then.

A moment can be characterized in two primary ways. Firstly, it can be analyzed into its firstnesses, or things in their in-themself-ness, their thusness, their haecceity; its secondnesses, or actual encounters between firstnesses; and its thirdnesses, or triadic relations taking account of secondnesses.

To take a simple humanly experienceable moment: walking outside yesterday with my son on my back, (1) I heard sounds that struck me in their very thusness, simply as they were; (2) I responded to these sounds with an affective thrust — a quickened heartbeat, a prick of the ears, a sudden stop, an unpremeditated gesture to Z to listen or look in that direction; and (3) I recognized some of the sounds in thoughts such as “There’s that thing I heard before, which sounds like a woodpecker, and I wonder what sort of woodpecker has made its way over here this week,” or “It’s a beautiful spring here this year.”

While my hearing the sounds was already a second, the sounds in themselves can be considered a first; the unpremeditated reactions were seconds; and the thoughts, or the meanings arising from those reactions, were thirds.

Secondly, a moment can be characterized by the dynamic co-arising of subjectivity (which is a thirdness), objectivity (in and through secondness), and withdrawal.

The first of these three co-active elements, subjectivation, is what occurs when I recognize sounds and make some sense of them: “I wonder what sort of woodpecker that is” and “It’s a beautiful spring this year” contribute to the narrative timeline I have of living here, of recognizing birds (as poorly as I do) and noticing their comings and goings over time; of living (and constructing) my life in the context of seasonal changes, debates over global warming, and much else. At the same time, my gesture to Z becomes an invitation for his subjectivation; my stopping and listening to the bird becomes an invitation to that bird’s subjectivation, wherein it might notice me and sing in some particular way in recognition of a new listener.

The second element, objectivation, is the other thing that happens when I recognize sounds and make some sense of them: that sound becomes “that woodpecker,” a sequence of seeings and hearings becomes “this spring,” and so on. Things become pinned to labels (verbal or other kinds) whereby they can be stitched into a fabric of habitual responses, incorporations, harnessings. They, like any commons, can be “enclosed.”

And thirdly, withdrawal is the other other thing that is happening in this moment, though it is happening outside my recognition (except insofar as I recognize it must be happening). It is what occurs with firstness that is not incorporated into the production of secondness and/or thirdness, and with secondness that is not incorporated into thirdness or into further secondness. It is, in other words, what happens with virtuality that remains unactualized.

Such withdrawal constitutes the imperceptible background of the moment, or at least part of that background. It is what is lost to experience, or to future experience (though these are not identical destinies), what is removed from “my” moment after having been available to it, in potential at least, at the outset.

*      *      *      *      *      *

There’s much more to be said about both of these characterizations of a moment. What I’ve described is really just a tiny fragment of a moment. And it is not really an actual moment, since I am only describing it from the perspective of one participating experiencer of a moment. So I am distinguishing here between experiential moments, which belong to a single experiencer, and actual relational moments, which are more complex, more (infinitely) difficult to define and describe. But those are for another discussion.

The two analytical tacks I’ve taken above constitute the Peircian and Whiteheadian strands, respectively, of pre-G analysis, and articulating them in a coherent synthesis is a project that I will need to continue working on, since Ecologies of the Moving Image did not really do that to any level of satisfactory philosophical rigor.

An initial application of pre-G, from a slightly different angle, to the capacities of the human bodymind can be found in the three posts beginning here. Starting with that human bodymind, again, makes sense because it is what we have some direct access to and because it is at the center of our own experience, which for us is a median-level phenomenon: it is the kind of experience that takes account of things that are both much smaller (such as the parts or sub-systems that make us up) and much larger (such as the social, ecological, and other systems in which we participate) and similar in scale.

More on all of that to come.

(Note: I made a couple of very minor changes since this was first posted.)

Related posts:

1. actual occasions
2. …& beginnings (a toast to this moment)
3. philosophy of the moment

With just enough distance to sense that I miss it already (in a brain-body hangover kind of way), but not enough for this to be taken too seriously, I offer some morning-after thoughts on the Nonhuman Turn conference.

1. It was a tremendous gathering of forces, of people doing valuable work with ideas, with knowledge-building practices and critical interpretive and reframing strategies (some of them novel and experimental, some of them simply variations on what academics do). For all that was said (at the end) about how washed-out the academic conference format is, this one was actually a very well-scaled meeting, making possible the kinds of conversations and connections that a larger conference would preclude. It was well run, technically savvy, and enjoyable. Remarkable in many ways.

2. The intellectual potential that was there at the outset — in its thrown-togetherness (by Richard Grusin) of an assortment of related conceptual frames, philosophical allegiances, and irrepressible human singularities — was partly actualized, but partly, I think, not. Yet.

That’s because actualization of this sort always takes time, and no one should have expected that these particular elements would have gelled into a robust solidarity on the spot. While more camps could have emerged, what seems to have occurred is a settling around two poles: the Whiteheadophiles and the objectologists. Maybe that much was predictable. (And since that particular debate has been a theme on this blog, this could be in part an artifact of my own perspective. But I heard it from many others.) Incipient other emergences appeared here and there, but not in the way that these two masts sailed around the proceedings in full splendor.

I heard rumors repeatedly of a blogosphere ravenously watching and waiting for the two camps to come to blows, to have some kind of showdown. While that never happened, courageous voices poked their heads to say “hey!” from time to time when they saw openings for a deepened mutual engagement. The “heys” can easily be misinterpreted: “why are we fighting?” can sound like “why are you fighting?”, “why are we (still) doing this?” (for instance, holding such conferences at all) can sound like a dismissive reply to “why are you doing this to us (generating anxiety in an anxiety-driven nation/world)?”, pokes at professional jealousy can sound just like professional jealousy, digs at academic citation practices can just sound smug. In the end, I most admired those who spoke from their heart (eat yours out if that sounds trite).

3. The social-media-blogosphere was always in the background, as much or more so than the art installations and other non-traditional conference effects that were much in evidence. Tweeted questions, Twitter feeds channeling in voices from around the world, Twitter itself being accused of and, at the same time, serving as an excuse for, bad behavior… (Why do people turn rabid behind their twitter personae?)

4. Actualization takes time. This will be a conference that sets off affective currents for a time to come. We will have stories about it, and mold it into our stories. For me, it follows in a tradition that leads back to 2007′s “Nature Matters” in Toronto and 2001′s “Taking Nature Seriously” in Oregon, both transdisciplinary meetings of critical ecotheorists and cultural and animal studies and STS folks. But for others it will connect up with other events — OOO conferences or new media brainstorms or posthuman gatherings of one kind of another.

My hope is that one of those affective currents will be a general acceptance that Whitehead is unavoidable, or at least not easily dismissible, in 21st century thinking about nature, culture, and media. (Thanks to Massumi, Manning, Shaviro, and Hansen for setting that direction out clearly, if not all in one voice.) Another might be that OOO also deserves to be taken seriously, that it’s not just a flash in the pan. And I sense a slight refashioning of OOO in the air, from being mainly a hard-nosed metaphysical doctrine to more of an affective opening toward the things themselves (Bogost’s OOO as the sense of wonder lost from childhood, Morton’s as a transcendental onto-eco-anxiety – themselves diametrically opposed variations that constitute two sensual faces of Harman’s withdrawn metaphysical insight-object). A third current may be the recognition — more, the undeniability — that new, 21st century media have become, and will be increasingly, part of the air we all breathe (as much as the toxins in our bio-onto-epi-genetic bloodstreams), whether we did when we arrived in Milwaukee or not.

5. All that said, the perception that OOO is somehow brash, rude, and intemperate is one that that crowd will have to deal with (or ignore). But I really believe it’s a cultural, stylistic, and somewhat generational thing: the blogo-social-mediasphere does certain things to us — I’m grateful to Wendy Chun and Mark Hansen for clarifying what some of those are — and schools of thought that emerge and grow primarily online will all come to sound somewhat that way. We all need to think about how this changes intellectual discourse.

6. It took some energy for me to live-blog the plenaries. For the most part, that just kept my attention from drifting, but for a few of the talks it was hard work and I wished I could give it up. I didn’t, except momentarily. I had said I’d do it, and I pushed ahead. Not quite sure why I did it at all, really — just thought it would be good: a service to those who weren’t there, a memory-jog to those who were, and a small contribution toward the crafting of a more robust network out of the pieces and bits that Richard Grusin had thrown together to create this 3-day machine.

Oh, did someone mention “Turn Fatigue”? This turn is a long one coming, and will continue for a long time to come. The last three days might serve as a point of contact that will have injected some energy toward new connections, as we all round this corner together.

Most of all, I’m grateful for the opportunity to have met, befriended or rekindled and deepened friendships with all sorts of creative and wonderful people: like Jane Bennett, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Steven Shaviro, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, Mark Hansen, Jennifer Slack, blogger friends such as Shane, Scu, Ben, and many, many others. Thanks especially to Richard Grusin for conceiving of and creating the whole thing, and to Mary Mullen and the staffers who made it all possible and refreshingly efficient.

That, at least, is how I saw and felt it. From the vantage point of the day after.

Now I’m thankfully heading back to the tweetless bliss of physicality (materiality, the dance of actuality and potentiality), with those I missed most. (And whom I don’t think I’ll ever get myself to call “objects.” Consider me unchanged in that regard.)

Related posts:

1. NT3: Grusin “Why nonhuman now?”
2. Wilber’s post-metaphysical turn
3. Nonhuman Turn Day 1: Massumi

Ian Bogost, “The Aesthetics of Philosophical Carpentry”

A talk about philosophy and the objects of which it’s made, in 12 parts (first 11 are pretend)

I. Enjoying This Presentation

II. The Things We Do: Airport tarmac. Philosophers in a lecture hall not unlike an aircraft approaching the runway. Multiple dancer airport performances. Air traffic controllers and graduate students. We do the things we do. Questions, comments. Thank you for flying.

What do we do when we do philosophy. I am completely freaked out about it.

III. The Non-Human Return: All the world’s Bogosts can be traced back to Milwaukee. Previous visits, family visits. Frozen custard. OOO is a reclamation of a sense of wonder lost in childhood. The rhubarb grown in the summer on Marion Street. Things. A re-turn to the things that were always here, waiting.

IV. Carpentry, Part One: Alien Phenomenology advances “carpentry” as a theory of philosophical productivity. I’m performing the act I critique, the commitment of philosophical work to esoteric writing, professional validation, publication “to have been written,” inaccessibility. Problems: (1) Academics aren’t good writers. (2) Writing is dangerous for philosophy, because it’s just one mode of being. We underwrite our ignorance of everything else. We miss the Great Outdoors.

V. Cows, Part One: Rejoinders against arm-chair cogitation of philosophers.  One trend is experiemtnal, cognitive philosophy. Or field philosophy (Frodeman). Ethics is so far a field only for human interests. Is it daft to admit that the world is full of interesting and somewhat secretive things? The cows would make better field philosophers; they work in the fields.

VI. Carpentry, Part Two: General carpentry extends woodcraft to any material. Special carpentry takes up a philosophical position, speculating about the experience of things. Harman’s “the carpentry of things” (Lingis), the way things fashion one another in (and?) the world at large. E.g.s of online things Bogost has made. Ontography (Latour Litanizer); metaphorism. Aesthetics as first and last philosophy.

VII. Cows, Part Two:  Custard-making. It trumps philosophy reading/writing. Video games industry schism (traditional developers vs. social game developers). “Social games on trial” game theory seminar. Theory-practice dialectic often more of a panegyric. Cow Clicker facebook game about facebook games; most successful work I’ve ever produced, more than 50,000 people played it. Cowpocalypse VR game. I’ve spent more time making & tending virtual cows than reading philosophy.

VIII. Carpentry, Part Three: What does it feel like to make cows, custard, things? Consider books. Thacker & Galloway prototype print-on-demand Lulu book. [Mark Hansen is watching hockey on his laptop in front of me. (!)]  We say we write books, but we write words that we send to someone to make books. Print-on-demand is even less design-controlled, like the lunch meats of publishing. Schaber/Yakoch book ‘Checking In/Checking Out’. Still a chasm between academic writing (to have written something) and authorship (to have produced something worth reading), and then to bookmaking.

IX. Materials:  Approaches: embracing the materiality of things; the use of computational models. Procedural rhetoric: making an argument out of a model. McDonald’s game: intended as a critique, but many students “really feel” for the corporate executives. “Oiligarchy” game. But if the game is incapable of doing that work, if traditional text media are better, then why make games? Purely aesthetic, an accessory? An orary (?), model of celestial motion.  Contrast with Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” One page (with chart) stands in for the rest. Text message exchange with daughter. Tim Morton after yesterday’s talk: asked why did you do what you just did? But no on asked Shaviro: why did you do what you did (cited philosophers and commented on them)?  We don’t question our materials.

X. Cows, Part Three: Dedicated Cow-clickers. “2-1/2 Men.” “Shit-crayons.” Wole Soyinka in prison using whatever materials he could find. Cowpocalypse: they have been raptured.

XI. Idiots: Winograd: photograph tells us how a piece of time and space looked to a camera. Gentle tragedy of carpentry: we somehow make things, and with practice make been beautiful things. I still like writing where the writing matters. The work I want to do with objects is metaphoristic; to write well rather than to write to completion. What if we took a break from philosophical history, from making arguments? The objects were there all the time, it was me who wasn’t. What if I listened to them? One day I hope this might be philosophy.

XII. While You Were Out: The city (Seoul), underground travel, platform screen doors. The doors are raised on specialized farms, near a Buddhist temple. Woman, mourning her love, turned into a dragon. The dragons who move people. The transit system expanded beyond the city. [ai: I can't capture the exquisite literary craft of this section, so I won't try. Read it when it is published, which I presume will take an appropriate book-like form.]

Q & A:

Q @ object-formation in children: a bag of onions, to an infant, is a bag, but when opened they are astonished. Can grown childhood lead us productively to thinking this?  IB: Yes. Harman’s “withdrawal” is that, that other-worldliness of things.

Q @ Winnicott’s play and transitional objects. These theoretical concepts are play objects. Pushing in another direction is easy for tenured folks, but divisions of knowledge where tenure is given still require playing by the old rules. How do we change that?

IB: Fear is the main problem. When you get enough attention, then it’s impossible to ignore you. Tenure is not about productivity, but impact. Those who achieve the goal the easiest are those who think the least about it.

Q: OK, the objects were always there, but were the mental objects always there?  IB: [missed, sorry]

Q (tweet): The beauty of non-scholarship: you can just claim you just thought of it. My students do that all the time…  IB: That’s true. So what? I don’t care about being new; it’s about what we use these things for.

Q (Erin Manning): I get it, you’re a good writer, etc., but why so many mean tweets over past 2 days? Why shut it down.  IB: My Twitter persona is different from me. What do we do about these intersecting worlds, me on Twitter different from me in this room? What if we took that seriously.

EM: There are people who are insecure in academe and have lost jobs because they’ve pushed those positions. How many philosophers do you know who are in philosophy departments? Many of us have had to find our ways of living, through having children, writing, spending weeks crafting a concept and then watching it fall apart. In Montreal students are striking… Since there are so few places to have these conversations, don’t we want this to be a venue when we can have this conversation, rather than posing one way of thinking against another?

IB: This (confernece) format of ours is broken.

EM: People have been incredibly willing to have a conversation. I’ve been surprised by it, because I don’t go to conferences. We can continue to pose, or we can say “hey, you’re making a real effort here.”

IB: I think you’re right, but we need to offload a lot of this stuff off of our persons. Try alternative formats: e.g., short statements, conversations, breaks. This is not a criticism of this event (Expletive deleted, from conference organizer. Laughter.)

Concluding comments by Richard Grusin

Are conferences broken? This has been a great 2-1/2 days, according to what I’ve been hearing. Some shorter papers maybe even better than plenaries, for some.

Many models for conferences. Erin, NAthaniel, Brian et al’s ideas for art, ThinkMakeDigital folks originally all wanted to craft the environment to break down those conferency things. Maybe that did work.

Relationship between conference in this space and conference in connected spaces (Twitter, etc.). Some say “No Tweeting! Do you let your students do that?” All of us are in this room, but not all of us are in that other conversation. I don’t think it’s disrespectful (’cause I do it), but we’re going to have to think about it.

But bringing people together physically is essential for knowledge. Online education is good for access, but for me education has been about sitting in a room with some quirky professor, some modeling, affective something-going-on. I hope we keep these things going in some fashion, and these universities.

Maybe, despite hesitancy (because there’ve been so many), a different kind of conference on the future of higher education?

Thank you, Mary Mullen. Thank you, everybody.

Related posts:

1. NT3: Grusin “Why nonhuman now?”
2. philosophy vs. ecoculture
3. advice

Both the future of and the future according to… The status of the future in relation to media. 21st century media.

Book on Whitehead’s philosophy as resource for thinking about 21st century media. Offering a different entry into Whitehead than most of the work that’s been done. Less interested in Deleuze-Whitehead than in W’s interest in quantification, data (datum), speculation (speculative account). Drawing on Jorge Nobo (extensive continuum), Judith Jones (intensity). In the service of a bringing of Whitehead together with phenomenology and theme of ‘sensibility.’

Why is Whitehead fruitful for 21st century media? Resources for nonhuman, non-anthropocentric model of media.

Potentiality is ontologically more important than actuality. Superjectal subjectivity, the power to impact the future. The data phase as inaugurating the process that results in concrescences. Intensity as product of process of prehension. Reject ‘eternity’ of ‘eternal objects’ in favor of Dewey’s ‘eternal objects’ emerging in the context of experience; Steve Goodman. Worldly sensibility that qualifies the operation of superjects. [He's talking too fast for me...]

In sum, ANW gives resources to think media as environmental and worldly in a radical way, prior to being subjective.

21st century media: what makes new forms of media today different from their forebears. Media following shift from past-directed recording platform to data-driven anticipation of the future.

Clip from “Minority Report” (precogs). Clip from “Person of Interest” series (on surveillance).

In “MR” visions of future are interpretable immediately; in “P of I” they only get data but no interpretation.

How digital computer as general platform for media interrupts circuit for media and experience. Has become less benign with Google/Facebook/et al consolidation, data mining for complete bypassing of consciousness.

How to reestablish sensory access to sensibility that is going outside our reach? We must enlist the same technologies that do that for our purposes. Rethink the pharmacology of media (Derrida’s pharmakon, B. Stiegler). Media simultaneously diminish and supplement expressive capacities of humans.

Upside: expanded sensory contact with worldly sensibility recompenses us for loss of traditionally agential human powers.

Whitehead’s process philosophy: affords an ontology of becoming that is neutral re human-nonhuman divide but provides foundation for theorizing human experience for its upside.

ANW’s expansion of process of perception in ‘Process & Reality’: (1) mode of presentational immediacy, (2) mode of causal efficacy (unprecedented in prior philosophy). (2) = vague, fleetingly glimpsable. Distinction fills out perception against broader material background. ANW broadens the scope of what figures into perception. For Massumi, Parisi, Goodman, et al, payoff is capacity to feel thought before it becomes available to sense perception.

This development of ANW is only one of 2 potential developments of ‘causal efficacy.’ CE = nonsensual perception in “Adventures of Ideas”, identified with immediate past of sensory perception, these critics foreclose the more radical implications: the way it opens human life to direct contact with causal efficacy in both modes – worldly sensibility, that can be accessed by means of biometric computational sensing agents. Potential for digital insight on our perception of the world – gives hope for a pharmacological recompense to 21st C media.

2 other implications of ANW that make him the pre-eminent for theorizing 21st C media: (1) potentiality in genesis of the new – betokens a feeling of the future in the present; (2) Whiteheadian model to address temporal predicament, living in a world where data industries can hijack domin of causal efficacy by targeting the present of sensibility in a manner disjoined from emergence of future consciousness & embodiment that it will help to cause.

E.g. Recorded Future (Swedish intelligence company with algorithm-based tech for predicting future events). Client base includes banks, govt agencies, hedge funds. Monitors the likelihood of future event, “allows you to visualize the future.”

Ad clip. (“Never before have you been able to reate a map of the future so easily…”) RecordedFuture.com.

It’s a third-generation search engine: examines implicit (“invisible”) links between documents that refer to same entity or event, separates content from aboutness of documents. On basis of references to outside events, establishes meaning between documents. Ranks entities based on factors incl. # of references, credibility, occurrences of events, etc. plus “sentiment evaluation.”

Temporal dynamics analysis: Events yet to happen scored on basis of present knowledge about them. RSS feeds integrates publishing time as an index. REsults in differentially weighted predictions about the future.

Stiegler. No viable future because industrial manufactured source has replaced lived memories. As consequence, our imaginings & expectations are projections of past manufactured, tertiary memories. Protension as projection, vs. Recorded Future.

ANW’s concept that entirety of future is implicated in every cycle of actualization. Every actuality prehends entirety of universe, bizarre as it sounds, is commensensical: every actuality arises on the basis of all that has come before. What’s prehended is potentiality. ‘Extensive continuum’ is real: all actual entities are related. Reality of future is bound up with reality of continuum. What implicates future in present is entirety of causal nexuses; wellspring of real potentiality. Solidarity of the universe.

ANW’s process philosophy as general ontology of probabilistic potentiality (?). Future potentiality as a real power in the actual present.

Recorded Future concretizes ANW: prediction concerns potentiality contained in transition from present to future, a potentiality with ontological power, the mode through which the future is felt in the present.

How to bypass contemporary capitalism: furnish a speculative account of total situation informing genesis of actualities, ANW foregrounds impossibility for any computational system to grapple with all of real potentiality. It’s a crucial check on misguided desire of data industries. Ability to predict future by means of present reference introduces a means for shaping human behavior toward the future (?).

Discussion of “Person of Interest”.

[ai: brain-break, a few minutes lost here]

In face of technical incursions that render the body directly machine-readable, we must embrace the body as a society of micro-sensibilities susceptible to technical capture.

NIA Triage: fMRI machine-hooked-up humans watching screens, neural-based target identification, etc. [fascinating stuff, but for me to hear it I have to stop typing].

Desire to bypass human forms of recognition to direct access of temporal sensibility (target ID, financial trading). Slowness of bodily time can no longer be tolerated.

Nigel Thrift’s account of worlding as following of propensities. Neural & genetic changes take time to impact body, but now technical practices can bring these in as pseudo-sensations and -perceptions. Engineered simulations of experience are offered in place of real.

Humans have no direct access to operation of sensibility. No access to affectivity. Capitalization of [...?] . The space of the missing half-second (Helmholtz) is a technical artifact, a result of a cyborg assemblage.

Political imperative facing media theory.

21st century media directly modulate worldly sensibility itself, shaping sensation before the emergence of bodily self and consciousness. ‘Causal efficacy’ is the relevant operational present in relation to which bodily self and consciousness are still-to-come future emergences.

Media theory must change its object: address the operational present of bodily sensibility. We need a politics of sensibility focusing on power of sensibility to shape future experience.

E.g. Sandy Pentland’s ‘Sociometer’: registers variety of bodily etc data, to make it accessible to consciouisness. Feed-forward structure of experience: presents opportunity to benefit from access to computational microsensing data.

This power remains partially indeterminate. Worlding and precognition both should aim at shaping future on basis of its real potentiality.

Q & A:

Q @ criminalizaion & imprisonment on basis of alleged intention. Following Wikileaks on Twitter can be used against you. What is to be done?  MH: Political activism can be done. [. . .]

Comment @ role of ads; ad-blockers.

Q (Erin Manning) @ Whitehead in “Symbolism”, “causal efficacy” is, e.g., the sit-ability of the chair preceding the dog jumping up on it; “present’l immediacy” is the chair… [more]   MH: Nobo’s reading of potentiality of settled world to give data of what isn’t. [more...]

Q @ Whitehead’s and Harman’s absence at this conference: 2 traces of Harman in talk – (1) moving away from Deleuzian take on ANW, (2) shift of ‘eternal objects’ our of eternity. You’re removing God and the occasionalism of ANW. Harman on Heidegger: actuality higher than potentiality for Harman; MH privileges potentiality over actuality. So MH is doing what GH is with ANW but in an inverse way.

MH: I’ve read Graham but wasn’t thinking of him here. What’s to be gained from making those kinds of comparisons?

Q @ Recorded Future etc.

[I missed some of this one; Hansen spoke too quickly; fatigue set in.]

No related posts.

The earth’s biological diversity is also the highest it’s ever been. We are living between the achievement (of speciation to tremendous levels of flourishing) and the projection (that up to half of species will go extinct in the next hundred years, massive extinction being underway). Celebrate the moment.

Appropriate thoughts for Cinco de Mayo (and belatedly for May Day and Beltane).

Related posts:

1. Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society

I will read quickly and show you more than I read. (Warning to readers: so this trans/re/scription will not be adequate.)

Threat that internet will be turned to a series of gated communities. Spam is another way to say I love you. This danger can be attenuated not through more security but through a wary embrace of the vulnerability that is networking.

My packet-sniffer has been quietly running in the background; software program that analyzes local traffic, developed to diagnose programs that are always failing, but reveals that interactivity can’t be reduced to user-generated mouse-clicks. Many packets simply read ‘can you read me?’

Promiscuous mode is the default: your network called reads in all packets and then deletes those not addressed to you, so you’ve downloaded illegal materials without you know it. Your computers always act promiscuously, then delete our promiscuous actions to make it monogamous. This normalization makes us vulnerable to back-orifice attacks. Your computer becomes a host or server without intending. A personal computer is an oxymoron.

Our perception of networks is linked to a political imagining of networks that is contradictory, public/private divide, open/closed divide. Internet as a mass medium to end the possibility of mass through US gov selling its backbone to private corporations. Public domain vs open source.

Early internet: “no one knows you’re a dog” (how on earth did we ever think this?). Now: a semi-private space of true names and true images, the authentic stems from the privately authenticating.

Pt. 1: Imagined networks

Power of networks: Manuel Castells, Duncan Watts, Hardt & Negri, Tiziana Terranova, Swarm Theory, militarizations, D & G’s rhizomes, Latour’s ANT. Networks encapsulate everything allegedly new about our current era, the new global formation, contagion, capital.

This assertion of networks has spawned predictable controversy & debate (are they really new? etc.). The debate assumes we already know what a network is. What do we mean when we say we’re connected? To what extent is a connection temporal rather than spatial, circulation rather than infrastructure? Our maps always projections rather than traces, too early rather than too late?

Networks have moved from planning tools to actually existing human and nonhuman systems. Ecologists study animal social networks. Network analysis is itself an abstraction, mathematical model. Data is too late and too early. To map is both to plan and to solve. Network analysis fosters networks; networks are themselves contagious, generating other networks.

Networks make porous the disciplines that employ networks, they find each other. To employ ANT one must become an ant. No end to networks, only more webs to be spun.

To make “it’s the network” the beginning rather than the end of the story I’ve been thinking of them as imagined. Not that they don’t happen, but that the force of networks stems from their figuring of connections that link and breach personal & social, biological & machinic, by their spatializing of the temporal. I’m revising Benedict Anderson on nations as imagined communities: networks allow us to imagine or to trace the unimaginable: global climate change, global capital, as they create unforeseeable futures.

Networks replace the postmodern pastiche with the zoom and the overview.

Pt. 2: Mapping the unimaginable

Networks key to neoliberal empowerment. Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodernism: the truth lies elsewhere, discontinuity between authentic and true, unmappability, suppression of distance; saturation of empty voids, no sacred spaces; barrage of immediacy. New dilemma: discontinuous realities makes cognitive mapping impossible.

Repeated across disciplines: Beck’s risk society. The unimaginable, unthinkable. Mark Granovetter on personal experience and larger systems, weak ties. Maps & mapping as key to resolving dilemma. Jameson called for not-yet-imagined form of cognitive mapping (refers to cyberpunk as degraded figure of it). It’s a strange formulation: we’re called to map unknowable global capital through another unknowable, technology.

Networks were to enable us to map the movement of unseeable entites: affects, capital, enviro toxins, global climate change. Very different understanding of networks: for Jameson & Granovetter they were key to reconnecting; for D & G they were promising because they frustrated, in their hetereogeneity, all transcendental and totalizing discourses. The map is performance.

Now new dilemma: we are forever mapping, deciding, empowered, but no less able to intervene into global formations. Mapping follows network logic, forever moving, never changing. A new dependency, the tools to map reality have supplanted reality. GoogleMaps are symbolic authority (Zizek). Facebook’s obsessive documentation defines what happened. Facebook is theory. To be is to be updated.

Performance of desire and deterritorialization has become basis of neoliberal capitalism. What’s the difference between neoliberal empowerment discourses and these calls for resistance?

Consider ‘risk-free’ complex network assets that spread risk everywhere. NEtworks thrive on an ignorance. Global climate change models: try for unverifiability, to defer the future they predict, to make themselves untrue. The space between prediction and what will happen shows the productive power of imagined network. Uncertainty opens up moments of decision, but not outside networks. Through mapping we are more tightly enmeshed in the system.

Climate is inconceivable without computation. This analysis of networks as tools of resistance needs an analysis of networks as central to capital (Castells, Terranova). New forms of control based on reductive notions of freedom.

The Friend (friend, free = dear). Emergence of chattering you’s, viruses, spams, I love you. Benedict Anderson’s imagined national communities arose via print. Now we are imagined networks, glocal collectives, series of “you’s” rather than collective “we.” The communal as a network weapon, depending not on mass ceremonies but on asynchronous events that perpetuate through a series of crises, nows, bubbles in time. Old constantly rediscovered as new. Individuals respond in their own time to singular yet connected events. Series, information as undead, constant perpetuation.

Bing.com search overload commercial. Hardly a decision engine. Seeks to end all decision by deferring to Microsoft.

Pt. 3: Friends and frenemies, or it’s not us(e) it’s you(se)

Value online is an open question. Data mining. Info is commodity, so value is generated. But remember that it was unclear that markets would emerge on internet. Freedom stemmed from anonymity not authentication. Obsessive politics of storage: now newness doesn’t determine value. Archived versions cost money: we pay because we missed it. References to things that have been taken down signify their importance, value marked as worth downloading/visiting. Value generated not by you but by plethoras of yous.

Yochai Benchler “Wealth of Networks,” Pierre Levy’s collective intelligence, Paolo Virno’s general intellect. But: traces of involuntary movement. Data richness stems from linking to others, affiliation networks, traces of interactions incorporated to understand yous, data analysis. Alan Sekula: body and archive related through separated systems of inscription; now these processes are inseparable. Amazon wants to predict and encourage future behavior.

Only works if we’re authenticated online: one login, one person; authenticating structure of friends. You are hailed in ideology (Althusser), hailings rarely missed their mark.

Richard Dienst: ideology as event, neither hails nor nails its subject in place, not perfectly destined, but this grounds the force of ideology. Ideology requires short circuit between singular and general, so reception of a representation becomes a representation of a reception. = Friending.

Transformation from default user to lurker to friend, in web 2.0. The authentic is the authenticated. ‘Anonymous’ is an intriguing exception/example. Provinelli: liberal fantasy of intimate love, claims to produce new form of social glue. Intimacy demands an expanding market.

Friendship is not love, but even stronger mark of sovereignty because it’s an equal relation. Friends negotiate middle ground, circulation that enmeshes others into networks. Virus warnings spread more effectively than viruses. Retroviruses spread through efforts to foster safety, endangering our security.

Internet as series of gated communities: we’re most vulnerable because we think we’re safe. Portals: enclose us in a seemingly private space.

Story of an iPhone phishing attack. No innocent web surfing. Outed her as stupid and maybe paranoid. Public embarrassment amplified by tweeting about it. From now on: only friend people you really hate (laughter). Spam as reaching out to say I love you. The difference between semi-automatic “Happy birthdays” and emails about dodgy Canadian pharma companies: involuntary messages remind us we are connected to them, they care enough about us to put us in danger. Slashdot’s “IT’s not a DDoS, it’s a hug. From a mob”.

Friendship can be reciprocal but fundamentally isn’t. J-L Nancy: freedom is an experience, attempt executed without reserve. A force that breaks bonds that enables friendship and destruction. A moment of having to act and respond without knowing how.

Q & A:

Q: 2 notions of networks: connection, capital. Information becomes valuable in proportion to its capacity to distract you. How does time come in?  WC: NEtworks as crisis-crisis-crisis, moment to decide, but defers the action it enables. Search engine syndrome: distracted and attentive at once. Time punctuated by actions. The event is central: networks are never as stable as appear. Old ecosystem models based from ordinary (ordinal?) differential equations to partial differential equations. Data remains because it’s repeated.

Q: fragility, catastrophe – internet might be part of unsustainable petroleum-based industrial system, may go down this century, leading to reversion to agricultural society. Will networks be ephemeral? Can lessons from this scenario be extracted forward to that scenario where we will need to resist feudalism?

WC: Global climate change is the catastrophe I’m concerned with. The catastrophe question is interesting, but maybe not most helpful way of thinking. Anarchism: Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” collectives. “Is the technological central to the network?” is an excellent question, an open question.

Q @ systems theory, granularity as problem of Forrester’s (?) model. How far down do we go in resolution to satisfy us?  WC: Network analysis is different from graph theory because it enables a movement between scales. Nodes, edges: fundamental unknowability about them. Relation between causality and correlation question. Relationality, but not causality.

Q @ loss of reticence (Philip Rieff?).  WC: I would ask the question differently: what forms of gaps or ways of withdrawing are practiced online? If you want privacy you need to multiply yourself, conflicting multiple traces of yourself. What reticence gave us is now being worked at differently.

Q @ etymology. Radical Philosophy article about piracy and open-access. ‘Peiron’: limitless formation that creates all the opposites. Network architecture. Formlessness (Dao de Jing). Maybe we should be thinking about deliberation, removal from the wave. What’s a thing? (ding, parliament).

WC: Formlessness – networks as fundamentally open, but question of decision is key. Is it a formlessness or a form of temporality at stake? We can’t stop with open-access, open-source.

Related posts:

1. iLAND Slow Networks symposium

The main questions were: What’s at stake in dividing Whitehead from Deleuze? What are the other axes along which we can configure the spectrum of ontological positions? (I skipped some of that in the actual talk, but the axes, apart from Harman’s individuality-versus-multiplicity/blurredness-of-an-object axis, include a morphogenetic “how do complex systems of relations arise?” axis, and the onto-epistemic “how do ontology and epistemology intersect?” axis, and the ethico-political “how do truth-ideas and truth-effects interact?” axis, and others.)

The final bit of my paper draws on the closing piece of Circus Philosophicus:

These [moments of greater interest to the process-relationalist] are times, for instance, when he suggests that it is not up to us to decide to withdraw or re-emerge from our relationless cocoon. It is, as he puts it in the final chapter of Circus Philosophicus, up to the things beneath us on the scale of objects, the parts that make us up. Sleep overcomes us, and waking overtakes us, not because we decide to do these things. “Only the zebra’s pieces,” he writes, “are able to guide it into new situations of some kind.”

Free will, Harman continues, “does not exist for objects, but only for pieces of those objects.” There is, he says, “an excess in our pieces beyond what is needed to create us, and this excess allows new and unexpected things to happen.” It is this way with all objects: “We are awakened neither by our own powers nor by the world outside, but by the swarming landscape within.[…] The dormant zebra, like all other objects, awaits a hailstorm from below.” (CP, 75)

I find this version of the object more lively, in Jane Bennett’s terms, more Deleuzian even, insofar as it suggests a swarming dynamism within an object that is no longer a black hole of pure withdrawal, but that has become an actual field of relations affecting the object. That this zebra is woken from within – from its “pieces,” as he puts it (as if the zebra’s body were an Ikea construction) – does not mean that it cannot also be awoken from without. This is, after all, a zebra Harman sees painted on a flag that is waving in a hailstorm. In this strange closing chapter of a strange book, a chapter framed by an account of Bruno Latour’s hosting the author in his flat in Paris, Harman acknowledges both the strangeness of this idea and the strength of the Latourian burgundy flowing in his blood when this idea seized him.

Something about this seizure – the swarm of burgundy, entering Harman’s body from a Parisian glass and filling it over the course of an evening, the swarm of a thought process, ricocheting between a painted zebra waving in the wind and an idea building in the mind of a philosopher – that tells me that Harman’s objects are affected not just by the pieces within. They are kicked into life because of a world in which what is within and what is without ceaselessly ricochet back and forth across the boundary of a questing selfhood. This, to me, seems as Whiteheadian and Deleuzian as anything.

Pass the burgundy. You may discover yourself to be a beatnik brother after all.

Related posts:

1. The beatnik brotherhood
2. ontologizing
3. Harman’s object-oriented philosophizing

Talking Heads video “Crosseyed and painless” (dir. Toni Basil, featured the Elecric Boogaloos). Is the non-national anthem of global anxiety. The sound of the end of the world and beginning of history. The first moonwalk is here (not Michael Jackson). The Levinasian “il y-a”, environmental creepiness, but we don’t know what yet. The dancers are suspended in claustrophobic white space, in their world.

The initial moment, the beginning of the blues, the waiting room (David Lnch’s red room). Facts all come with points of view. Irony becomes the food of phenomenological sincerity. A car, covered with a sheet, a tool, an object, a rainbow as a sign of an existential threat, a rainbow connection between things. They are here. Carpocalypse now.

[ai: No way to keep up with Tim. I first wrote that "with Time," then corrected myself. No way. Time or Tim.]

The melancholic uncanny of a world made of broken or uncared-for objects. Race, environment, things, all intertwined. What is happening with the world? How on earth does it stand with Being?

Eno. A broken record player. A broken nonhuman Manhattan.

Vidicon Video Camera Tube (in 1970s video cameras). How depth, complexity and manifold nonhuman folds of the assemblage view it. The vast dimension of Kant’s reason was teeming with things. The songs “facts,” quasi-thoughts, fact-fish. Composition of phosphor screen in a cathode ray tube. A record of accidents, impurities, abandoned object-cathexes. The Forbidden Gap, luminescence, the Forbidden Mechanism. The Forbidden City, they still exist, forbidden colors, fragile quantum magic. Not totally out of bounds, just hard to access. The gap is a neontic nothing, not the total absence of anything at all.

The death drive, a little life and death at the quantum level. DNA, in an RNA world. Is life just a small metaphysically dubious region of a much larger region? Dance between stability and instability. The death of a thing is its successful translation. Appearance is a trace of death, a thing. Form is the past. [ai: !! Whitehead all over here, Tim...]

A zombie that scoffs at the rigid boundary between death and life, an alien being, undermining [?] the temporal atomism that underlies [?] the metaphysics of presence. The always-already presence of an object. Aliens are in our midst. We are in their midst. Whose midst is it anyway?

In our U-Boat of Dasein in the ocean of sensual objects, we detect a coral reef of actual beings.

Facts are the shadows of things, their echo, nothing on the face of things. Facts are on the side of illusion because there are real things that they don’t touch.

The current emergency, of nonhuman beings, the existence and coexistence of things.

Anthropocene. 1790. When human history begins to intersect with geological time; carbon deposited in Antarctic ice. Correlationist origin. Basic anxiety of the loss of the world, a prologation of things, disappearance of a meaningful background, and thus of the foreground. The trouble with ecology: it brings everything too close. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. [cf. the blog post here on that]

Nihilism is a thicker layer of seaweed version of the island of doubt. I’m still waiting. Aperture, sense of opening. There is always already an entity, a being, an object, a specific unique being. The proximity of an alien abyss.

The car winks at me knowingly. Inside the beauty is the Thing. Ecological awareness is the uncanny nightmare charnel ground realm, where nothing is precisely real, and all the more real for that. We are always already caught in the shine of the headlights of the nonhuman. Suspended in the demonic interspace of things.

OOO gives us this worls, a spooky world plauged with beings who may not be alive, a world of always incomplete Turing test date. A claustrophobic world of slightly evil illusion. The mask worn by trickster objects as they put us down into a neo-animist universe of lies, traps.

The shifty ghostly meontic nothing of nothingness. The abyss is not behind things but in front of things, the abyss of causality, the aesthetic dimension.

What is called Nature is the reduction of things to their givenness for humans. They are here. Ecological awareness, always belated, finding yourself inside something, called Biosphere. An ocean of anxiety dancing around another ocean of anxiety. That car, a not-car, an ocean of color.

They are here. The car is still waiting.

Q & A:

Jane Bennett: What are you doing? Have you considered the effect of your anxiety making distribution machine? We Americans have just gone through Global War on Terror anxiety machine. The talk is a symptom of a larger infection. Why do these alien objects provoke anxiety rather than being familiars?

TM: The War on Terror was a way of covering up this anxiety that I’m talking about. Now people in America know what it’s like to be bombed. OMG there’s an Outside. That’s the anxiety. I’m talking about an unconditional basic anxiety, the sort of thing that comes into meditation. I’m selling my house right now, you have to evacuate it. Imagine a Third Worlder taking out a loan. The anxiety is connecting us, the feeling of coexisting. Inside the anxiety is the depression, the melancholia, the footprint of something else in your soul (Freud), which you now have experiential evidence that there are Others in your world. You’re living in the animist future. The anxiety is the feeling we all have as we’re exiting modernity. We have been modern (contra Latour). My world has dissolved, reality has appeared. But reality is a trickster. My job is to get people excited about evil.

Q: I’m not feeling anxious because I recognize the performative. What is the machine you’re made here, the rhythm word-mash machine, trying to do?

TM: It’s a homeopathic dose of the unconditional fear. Cynicism has been defeated by other beings. I can’t exit reality with escape velocity quickly enough. Scientists say “Can’t you see, numskull, that there is global warming.” My job is is to show a different belief about belief, as not something you hold onto very tightly. Instead of persuading people it’s real, I have to walk you through a phenomenologically equivalent inner-space experience to realize, OMG, there are other beings. I’m giving you a homeopathic dose; that’s the magic key. Allergy medicine.

Q: Slam poetry has expressed that anxiety…. TM: Art is a way to think when thinking is hard, a way to walk us through thinking that is difficult, a way to do philosophy by other means.

Q @ Talking HEads as a NYC band, and move out global from there. Discuss My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Other trajectories? [?]  TM: There are already other beings there; it wasn’t pastiche but a warning sign: beep-beep other beings exist.

Q @ fiend and friends: objects can be fiends and friends, switching back & forth. I experienced you as a frightful friend…

Q @ the performative and rhythmic: a promo for OOO? I fear that OOO will be just a moment, just a school like Lacan, Deleuze, et al. How do you institutionalize it beyond a small set of hipster theory folks? I think the performative move might be part of it…

TM: There’s a performative dimension to communication, as Padmasambhava showed when he brought Buddhism to Tibet – a hit man, magician. How do we get millions of people to be as passionate about reality as we all are in this room?

JB: Not with anxiety.

TM: California is the capital of hesitancy in the world. Is this a conversation? I need it to be verified. In that situation you need a bit of miracle. OOO is deeply congruent with Buddhism (despite what the philosophical Buddhists say). Buddha-nature is an object. To get people to tune in to that we need to do magic, which is scary. Within logic you can find strange things that were discovered by, e.g., Kantor, the infinity of real numbers, are they weirdly discrete like these OOO objects. Is this infinity, and this and this?

Q: Fundamental lesson of Buddhism is that everything is interconencted. There are no objects…. TM: Yes, but there are mountains, and there are no mountains, and there are mountains. Otherwise you could commit murder. What I’m trying to say is not that it’s an illusion, but that it’s like an illusion. You can’t tell how far the illusion goes. This is a symptom of the realism, the suchness. I’ve become this Honolulu guy for OOO.

Q (R. Grusin): Homeopathic dose of anxiety – but that’s what our media has been doing since 9-11: a feedback loop in which we’re made anxious repeatedly… TM: That’s allopathic, not homeopathic… RG: The homeopathic part is when we reconnect with what’s onscreen [?]… TM: There’s a dialectical tension… RG: I’m with Jane in that I don’t think fear is the best way to go.

RG: I enjoyed the performance, but is it transferable?  TM: There’s no metalanguage. Ecological awareness is that truth. My subject-position is interwoven into the things that I construct. I believe in following the form; we can’t go into complete anything-goes. First you make perfect rice-pudding, then you make it a little burned, because it’s tastier; my job is to make a slightly evil rice-pudding, ’cause I got tenure.

Related posts:

1. Morton’s poetry
2. on Buddhism, objects, Zizek, Morton, etc.
3. Those objects in the rearview mirror…

I took a break from live-blogging [added later: I had originally written "love-bloggin" LOL. I won't correct other typos, but there're probably many of them here] during the break-out sessions, taking advantage of the time to work a bit more on my own paper, to be given this afternoon. I’m picking things up now with Steven Shaviro’s plenary. Since Steven regularly blogs his work (at The Pinocchio Theory), and since I’m getting a little worn out keeping up with our great speakers, this may be a little less detailed. 

Steven Shaviro, “Consequences of Panpsychism”

Opening caveats: We should resist conflating Speculative Realism with OOO; it’s like conflating animals with cats. Also, use of “human” better as an adjective than as a noun.

This is a completely different essay than the one of the same title presented in NYC.

What is it like to be a rock? Rucker SF story.

Panpsychism is a thesis that even rocks have minds. Quoting David Skrbina, Thomas Nagel. Basic physical constituents of universe have mental properties; mind is universally distributed. Mind is a property of matter; thinking differs in degree, but not in kind, all the way up and down.

Colin McGinn’s dismissal of panpsychism. Galen Strawson admist it sounded crazy, but got convinced there is no alternative. Skrbina demonstrates its long pedigree: from pre-Socratics to Spinoza to James and Whitehead, now returned with a vengeance. Especially interesting in light of NH Turn and SR. Rebukes both idealism and reductionism/eliminativism.

The problem is one of extension: what can it mean to extend mentality to everything? Many philosophers have said we can’t: Descartes, Heidegger, Rorty, Ranciere, Zizek, all insist on centrality of linguistic forms, or action (as opposed to behavior), or something.

Plants, slime molds, bacteria – evidence that they do exhibit will. But a rock, a neutrino? Mentality, however, need not be contingent on the ability to speak. Panpsychism implies autonomy of all entities from our apprehension and perhaps from our concern; they exist pour-soi as well as en-soi, autonomous centers of value.

Whitehead, conatus, autopoiesis: too much emphasis on self-maintenance of identity. Simondon’s individuation; will to change (Whiteheadian poet Charles Olson). Whitehead finds value in existence as its own justification. Existence upholds value-intensity for itself, values and desires are bound up with the very being of an entity. The vaule experience is the essence of the universe (Whitehead).

Standard retort to Whitehead is accusation of anthropomorphism. But it’s the reverse: our own value activities emerged out of what brought us into being. Critique of Meillassoux and Brassier.

Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” There is something that it is like to be that organism. Best we can do is to create aesthetic semblances alluding to other organism’s/entities’ experiences. For Nagel, it’s a question of what being a bat for the bat itself, not just for us. Bogost’s “alien phenomenology.” Nagel moves from epistemology to ontology, but the bat’s thinking is inaccessible to us. [ai: compare with OOO?]

But so is any other person’s experience, and even my own, inaccessible to me. You can feel my tooth but not my toothache. Wittgenstein: first-person experience is not a something, and not a nothing either. Daniel Dennett (mistakenly) thinks he’s a Wittgensteinian by striving to extirpate interiority; eliminativism. But he throws out the baby with the bathwater.

Wittgenstein’s critique is actually directed as much against scientism as against idealism. Not everything in the world is a matter of fact. Knowledge of what I am thinking and feeling is the same sort of thing as knowledge of what others are thinking and feeling.

Nagel. I can know what my cat is thinking, or that she is thinking. Language should not be accorded too privileged a place in our understanding of experience. David Chalmers. With or without language, we observe the behavior of others, and can infer that inner experience exists in them. A bat’s experience, and a human’s, is indubitable, but also spectral.

Whitehead. Most experience is vague and indistinct. The primitive experience is emotional feeling, though feeling may be blind and emotion vague. Descartes et al took clear and distinct experience as their starting point. Dennett’s eliminativism is reductio ad absurdum of the premises he shares with his opponents.

Galen Strawson’s panpsychism argument is most reasonable here: mentality/experience of some kind is what’s most certain. The only way to explain essence of experience in the terms of physics is by explaining it away. Strawson gets rid of Descartes’ dualism; experiential phenomena are real in their own right, but no presuppositions necessary about the “I” or thinking thing. We should reject the assumption that the physical is non-experiential.

Matter not only passive but productive and formative. Strawson, however (unlike Whitehead, Barad, Bennett, Delanda), is anti-emergentist. But he encourages us away from using “quantum indeterminacy,” et al, like magic wands. Novelty, for Whitehead, cannot emerge ex nihilo; it is possible on the basis of and in response to the “stubborn fact which cannot be evaded.” Sentience must already have potentially been present at the very beginning, in matter itself.

Strawson is a scientific reductionist, but insists experience is irreducible and that mentality is inaccessible to scientific explanation. First-person experience cannot be captured in third-person accounts. Panpsychism is the consequence of accepting the self-evidence of experience. Strawson is in this sense not far from Whitehead.

Whitehead. Sam Coleman: radicalizes Nagel’s bat argument, transforming it into a foundational ontological principle. Coleman: physics express extrinsic natures of entities, leaving intrinsic natures aside. Physics has never pretended to tell us what an atom (or anything) is for itself. Physical causality leaves out the real loci of causal power.

Ladyman & Ross’s “Everything Must Go”: no things. Give up the attempt to learn about unobservables. Harman’s critique of Ladyman & Ross. William Seager and Harman both point to intrinsic properties. But in what does their intrinsic nature consist?

Interiority is neither a something nor a nothing. Publicity and privacy co-exist for everything in the universe. The privacy of the neutrino: it is like something to be a neutrino. Harman claims all objects are withdrawn from access. For Shaviro, this withdrawal is nothing more nor nothing less than the privacy of that object. Harman makes too much of it, rendering it into a vacuum. Such an approach risks reducing ontology to epistemology. (?) Harman: when fire burns cotton, it doesn’t come to know the cotton completely. But this dimension is not definitive: publicly objects and entities do interact totally even if they are at the same time withdrawn privately.

Whitehead: The distinction between “public” and “private” is an abstraction. Contemporary events occur in independence from each other. Each actual entity enjoys the freedom of its own experience; but also open to causal influences, to affect and be affected. I’m inwardly free and outwardly in chains; I’m inwardly imprisoned and outwardly free to act. (Both true.)

No proof of the inner life of a neutrino – or of anything else; unavoidable. But I acknowledge and value the inner life of human beings, and can do it with all kinds of others. What’s needed is an extension of sympathy. (Massumi, Bennett connections.)

Panpsychism steps outside correlationist thinking and acknowledges we cannot step into others’ thinking. Harman argues that things think when they interact, but not otherwise. Shaviro doesn’t believe absolute nonrelationality is possible, because he attributes mentality to the private side of entities, not to the public relational side. Need more thinking on this.

The affective turn, versus cognitivism. Sentience is a more basic category than life or vitality. Life is possible because there is sentience. Whitehead is more of a panpsychist; Deleuze is more of a vitalist. Thacker; critiques of vitalism.

Science fiction: Life cycle of software objects.

Q & A:

Q (Ian Bogost) @ real and sensual objects… SS: trying to get beyond the polemics of previous debates. GH is reifying this difference too much, like noumenon and phenomenon; better to talk about dual aspects rather than a rift.

Q (Jane Bennett) @ problems of vitalism… SS: You (JB) deal ell with 19th century vitalism in Vibrant Matter. Saying everything is alive is almost saying too much. I (SS) prefer Whitehead’s expression of different tendencies: e.g. perpetuation by repetition versus by novelty. Talking about life leads to weird issues @ will to power, reproduction, virality/zombieness, et al. Thacker traces the problematic from Aristotle through Medieaval to Deleuze: sentience gets around the problems identified by him, with more modest claims. Haven’t worked it out fully yet.

Q @ David Ray Griffin’s “panexperientialism” vs. panpsychism: is there a difference?  SS: the two aren’t really different, but it’s better to start, as Whitehead did, with the most primordial and works up to consciousness.

Q “from hippie direction”: Frank Zappa: if we heard a rock speak, it would be saying “help, I’m a rock.” Does this mode privilege a being with stuckness over processes of becoming?  SS: That’s why I’m uneasy with “conatus” or “autopoiesis” ascribed to nonliving things. The way entities persist through time is more complicated than by saying “I am a rock.”

Q @ use of reason and threshold of what consciousness or mind are…  SS: We’re not sure what reason is. Philosophy is love of wisdom; doesn’t mean you have it and are stating it. It’s a reaching, and a matter of degree.

Q (R. Grusin) @ things in motion vs. as isolated mental objects… SS: Whitehead (and Levi Bryant also) says that nothing is just there; it’s an activity to keep itself in place. One and the other go together.

Q (me) @ sentience, mentality, mind, et al.: trying to find the right word for what everything shares; what about “interiority”?  SS: I’m drawing more on Whitehead for my choice of terms, but interiority could work just as well.

Q [...]  SS: I like Harman’s aesthetics of allusion; physical interactions. Always a question of where you’re going to draw a line, and we draw different boundaries for different reasons. Pete Wolfendale’s (Deontologistics) justification of meat-eating, but the idea of having a moral justification of it appalls me.

Thanks to Jennifer Slack for the photo.

Related posts:

1. Panpsychism in the news?
2. Shaviro responds
3. Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.