January 2011
1 post
“Bohm’s vision is remarkably congruent with that of Whitehead. They share in...”
– John B. Cobb, Jr. on the similarities and differences between Bohm’s “implicate order” and Whitehead’s thought. From the book Mind in Nature. I am trying to think through how Whitehead rejects the extremes, both of an underlying monism on the one hand, and of an...
November 2010
2 posts
“Contemporary social and political theory is characterized by an opposition...”
– Levi Bryant on The Critique of Dialectical Reason. I find this dichotomy between Spinozans and Kantians in social/political theory very suggestive. I would link this comment with Jameson’s comment that the Sartre of the Critique is one of the very few philosophers (along with Fourier) who...
societies/affectivities
DeLanda is right to propose assemblages as opposed both to isolated individuals and to internally determined totalities. But he doesn’t say anything useful about the genesis of these assemblages. I think they need to be understood affectively, and the question of how they are able to endure needs to be posed instead of just assumed. I think that Whitehead’s much-criticized (or...
October 2010
1 post
“[O]bjects are neither autonomous realities that are independent of all their...”
– Jeffrey Bell, “Some Thoughts on Emptiness”
August 2010
2 posts
Open/closed
For Luhmann, the concept of “operational closure” marks a radical break with the tradition “that supposed that something from the environment enters into the one who cognizes and that the environment is represented, mirrored, imitated, or simulated within a cognizing system.” But these two claims need not go together. For Whitehead, it is precisely because something from the “environment” (though...
More on Conatus
Jeffrey Bell on Spinoza’s conatus:
[A] key function or effect of our appetites is to select against objects, to select against excessive differences and determinations, for these differences and determinate objects may undermine the ratio of motion and rest and hence undermine (kill) the very durational existence of the body itself. God, on the other hand, as absolutely indeterminate and...
July 2010
2 posts
“If you’re doing something really experiential — I think of it more...”
– Kathryn Bigelow, interviewed in Cinemascope 37 (Winter 2009), page 35.
I really really love this. This is the key to Bigelow’s aesthetic as an action director (or, as she would prefer it, experiential director). The care she takes over geography and physicality is what unites her with Samuel...
Relations and Novelty, once again
I think that this gets to the heart of my disagreement with my OOO friends.
Levi Bryant quotes Bruno Latour as follows:
…what should appear extraordinarily bizarre is, on the contrary, the invention of inanimate entities which would do nothing more than carry one step further the cause that makes them act to generate the n + 1 consequence which in turn are nothing but the causes of the n + 2...
June 2010
5 posts
“But any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must...”
– Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas pp. 184-185.
This is Whitehead’s justification for a certain type of anthropomorphism, i.e. for attributing desires and satisfactions, and experience in general, to all organisms. Either we are dualist and anthropocentric, saying that human beings alone have...
“If anything, The Eagle Path, announced as “un drame psychologique,”...”
– The Ferroni Brigade on Van Damme’s Eagle Way
Attention and "freedom"
William James, in the chapter on “Attention” of his Principles of Psychology, is very interesting on the question of whether paying attention to something is a free act or an entirely (physiologically) determined one:
If feeling is an inert accompaniment [to neural activity], then of course the brain-cell can be played upon only by other brain-cells, and the attention which we give...
“Though irony is mother’s milk to him, Waters’s quest for genuine communication...”
– Lynne Tillman on John Waters. This reminds me of Graham Harman on sincerity: “Everyday life is laced with sincerity through and through, in the sense that I really am doing whatever it is that I am doing…” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, pp. 135ff)
“Harman’s insistence on the non-relational kernel of objects, their resilient or...”
– Dominic Fox (Poetix) on Graham Harman. I find this helpful and suggestive; the assertion of objects’ withdrawal is how Harman avoids panpsychism. (And indeed, in Harman’s article on panpsychism in the Skrbina anthology, he says that not all objects are conscious because objects not...
May 2010
4 posts
“In order to more fully conform to white bourgeois patriarchal ideals, hipsters...”
– Robin James, “In, But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, and White Embodiment”
“Eagle Way (Jean-Claude Van Damme, Thailand/HK/USA): Examples of a Bicameral...”
– Cannes 2010 reporting by Daniel Kasman from mubi.com I must say, this sounds totally great.
Societies (Whitehead)
Adventures of Ideas, page 204: Whitehead distinguishes (as always) between entities or occasions, and societies. But his language here is interesting. On the one hand, there are “the completely real things which are the actual occasions.” On the other hand, “the real actual things that endure are all societies.” So, although Whitehead’s distinction violates Levi...
“Afro-Futurist robo-diva R&B can be understood as reverse-engineering the...”
– Robin James, “Robo-Diva R&B”: Aesthetics, Politics, and Black Female Robots in Contemporary Popular Music
—Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 20, Issue 4 (2008) Pages 402–423
“No leftist polemicist could come up with as damning a description of...”
– E. J. Dionne, “How Wall Street Creates Socialists”
What I love about Tourre’s email quote, and which Dionne fails to mention, is the (typically neoliberal) idea that people should govern and manage themselves the way financial corporations do: “the real purpose of my job is...
April 2010
3 posts
“Olfactory-auditory integration adds to a growing list of intimate connections...”
– Scientific American, April 2010: Making Scents of Sounds: Noises May Alter How We Perceive Odors
(The neurobiology of object-oriented ontology)
Gaga Studies (some links)
Some months ago, I posted a list of links to recent discussions of Gaga and Beyonce videos. I will update and expand the list here; since the previous version was pre-“Telephone”, and a lot more has been posted recently.
Troy Patterson on “Bad Romance” video
Oscar Moralde on Lady Gaga’s videos
Amy Odell on “Telephone” video
Meghan Vicks on Beyonce/Gaga...
February 2010
2 posts
“The cultural logic of late capitalism may have been pastiche and irony, but the...”
– Unemployed Negativity, commenting on Dollhouse.
Objects and Autopoeisis
Levi Bryant interestingly links his thesis (and Graham Harman’s) about objects being withdrawn from relation, or from contact with other objects — with autopoiesis, making the connection via Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman — here.
This is useful to me, precisely because it links together two arguments that I tend to dislike: withdrawn objects on the one hand, and...
January 2010
5 posts
Code and Execution
Sebastian Franklin: code “represents a formal language that is directly actional. Code makes things happen without passing through the realm of interpretation; it always relates to action resulting from formal processes” (36).
This leads to Franklin’s idea of “executive editing” in contemporary mainstream film; scenes are edited so as to produce immediate audience...
Jameson on postmodern temporality
Even amidst Jameson’s discussions of narratology, which I must admit do not greatly engage me, there are fine observations and formulations which continually emerge, such as the following:
Human time has in late capitalism undergone a kind of structural mutation… Postmodern synchronicity implies…that the multiplication of relationships in the present (sometimes ideologically...
“[T]he replication of the system of late capitalism even within the thoughts and...”
– Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, page 363.
“In his droll 1989 book Making Meaning, the American scholar David Bordwell makes...”
– Adrian Martin, “Tsai-Fi”
“Hardt and Negri are right: our economy is immaterial now, but that immateriality...”
– Kazys Varnelis, “The Decade Ahead”
December 2009
4 posts
“For me, money has displaced the pivotal concepts of twentieth-century European...”
– Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money, p. 265.
“The story of this decade has been about the defeat of bohemia by business. Now...”
– Mark Fisher, “The Age of Consent”
“Aesthetics for me is a matter of rupturing the relation between an object and...”
– Graham Harman, responding to Paul Ennis’ commentary on Harman’s “Vicarious Causation” essay. I am very much in sympathy with Harman’s suggestion of “aesthetics as first philosophy”; though I want to say that “rupturing the relation between an object...
Gaga and Beyonce videos
Just noting some discussions of the recent videos:
Lady Gaga, Bad Romance (Francis Lawrence)
Beyonce f. Lady Gaga, Video Phone (Hype Williams)
There have been several interesting commentaries:
30 Frames on Beyonce/Gaga rivalry
It’s Her Factory on why Video Phone does not have to do with the “male gaze”
Huffington Post on Gaga video
Slate “notes toward a close...
November 2009
5 posts
“The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but...”
– From “The Necrosocial”, a sort of manifesto of the current resistance movement at the University of California. My problem with this kind of argument is the following: if this is really an accurate critique of the university, then why should the university be saved or defended?...
“Thought is able to unite differences across space and time differences. When we...”
– Christopher Vitale, “Mediology at the Quantum Scale”, posted in networkologies. I would prefer to see this in Whiteheadian terms than in Leibnizian ones. (And indeed, Vitale associates all this with Whiteheadian “privacy”: “as Whitehead has argued, all quantum events,...
“They, the breasts, and not their ‘owner’, are the centre of...”
– Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books, 2009), p. 25.
“Latour’s concept of translation is broader than that of translation as it...”
– Levi Bryant, “Relations of Translation Between Actants.” The production of the new via translation — this is already the point of Whitehead’s theory of prehension.
Causation, vicarious and not
Several postings today that get at Graham Harman’s theory of vicarious causation, that I just want to note here for future reference:
Michael Austin’s explication of Harman’s theory
Levi Bryant’s response
Graham Harman’s own response
For what it’s worth, I think that I am more in accord with Levi’s position than with Graham’s. Levi says that...
“Eliot’s T-shirt bears his new “Meaning” logo, a collection of...”
– Lee Konstantinou, Pop Apocalypse, page 102.
October 2009
2 posts
“The parasite is another politically ambivalent diagram that shifts from a...”
– Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits, page 48.
Cf. my own take on Paul Di Filippo’s Phylogenesis.
September 2009
4 posts
Ground and God
I explained Whitehead’s God in relation to D & G’s Body Without Organs. But it seems that both of these might be usefully put in the context of Schelling’s conceptions of Ground and of God, which I am only beginning to understand (with the help of Grant, Andrew Bowie, and Zizek). Say that Whitehead’s God, like the ungroundable Ground in Schelling, is a necessary...
Productivity of Nature
Andrew Bowie (Schelling and Modern European Philosophy) explains how Schelling’s conception of the PRODUCTIVITY of nature cannot be conceived as being the same thing as force. Rather, productivity is different from anything assumed by (conventional, 19th-cent.) vitalism: “the essence of a thing is the concatenation of forces which it is, not something else beyond this concatenation....
“As soon as capital has become capital as such, it creates its own...”
– Marx, Grundrisse, p. 460
Limitation
Deleuze: In actualization, “the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts.”
This is crucial as an aspect of Deleuze’s rejection of dialectical negativity. But it is really possible to avoid “limitation”? The question of limitation is part of what Whitehead is always dealing with; in SMW...
August 2009
12 posts
Speculative realism and the nature of thought
There would seem to be a substantial difference between Graham Harman, for whom correlationism is the philosophy of “human access”, and Quentin Meillassoux, for whom correlationism is any attempt (ever since Parmenides) to say that thought and being are the same.
For Harman, to reject correlationism is to be able to “speak in the same way of the relation between humans and what...
“The word ‘decision’ does not here imply conscious judgment, though...”
– Whitehead on decision: Process and Reality 43.
“The inanimate-animate distinction is perhaps one of the most persistent dualisms...”
– Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p 419, footnote 27
Whitehead vs Wittgenstein, on value
Where Wittgenstein says that:
“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists — and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case… . It must lie outside the world.”...
“One of my problems with OOP has been with its lack of conatus, will, or drive....”
– Complete Lies on Graham Harman. (This has affinities with my own critique; though I insist on Whitehead’s claim that “life means novelty”, as opposed to conatus or the tendency of things to merely perpetuate themselves.)
Whitehead, emergence, decision
Whitehead’s Ontological Principle (“actual entities are the only reasons” — PR 24; “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere” — PR 244) would seem to disallow strong emergence. It is thus parallel to Galen Strawson’s attack on strong emergence, even without necessarily assenting to Strawson’s reductionism. The consequence, for...
“Whitehead’s concepts are articulated in such a way that no cause, even God...”
– Isabelle Stengers, “Thinking With Deleuze and Whitehead,” in Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, ed. Keith Robinson (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). page 40.
“*The phrase “process philosophy” can be misleading. It might suggest that one is...”
– Graham Harman’s provisional response to my provisional criticisms.