(((Knowledge Ecology)))

Time: 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM Location: Multipurpose Room: Student Community Center

Speaker: Isabelle Stengers, Free University of Brussels Interlocutor: Donna Haraway, UC Santa Cruz

This is part of the 2012-2013 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures “Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Dialogues About the Reconstitution of Worlds”

This year long seminar will convene an interdisciplinary and international group of renowned scholars to discuss comparatively the innovative world-making possibilities that might emerge from the conceptual and political interrogation of the division between nature and culture that organizes modern life. Our guests–sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, literary critics–work on science and technology studies, environmental studies, indigeneity, critical design studies, and feminism.

This event is sponsored by Anthropology, DHI, STS, CSIS, and LGBTRC

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May 14, 2013

Latour and the Politics of Nature

Via ANTHEM:

Abstract:

By Graham Harman

Bruno Latour describes his Politics of Nature as work of political ecology. Its subtitle, “How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy,” suggests a specific and limited topic, albeit an interesting one. Yet what this book really offers is a full system of metaphysics, perhaps the first original system of the new millennium. Latour declares these large ambitions openly. In so doing, he is fully aware of the stones that might be showered upon his parade: he warns us jokingly of “a dreadful specter…the obligation to engage in metaphysics, that is to define in turn how the pluriverse is furnished and with what properties [its members] must be endowed.” Here already we see what separates Latour from some of the better-known French thinkers of the preceding generation: Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. Like these other figures, Latour is usually pigeonholed as a “postmodernist”; unlike these others, no legitimate case can be made that Latour deserves this label. Owing much to Whitehead and nothing to Heidegger, Latour belongs to an invisible but effective tradition in contemporary philosophy that might be called “School X,” for lack of a better name. School X has nothing to with either the analytic or continental schools, which are often taken to exhaust the field of possible contemporary philosophies. The endless duels and reconciliations of the analytics and the continentals, like those of Pepsi and Coke or Doritos and Tostitos, only distract us from their overarching shared features. Both schools remain too loyal to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Both continue to loiter in that narrow strip of philosophy that deals with the conditions of human access to the world rather than the world itself-for the simply reason that they assume from the start that philosophy has no legitimate right to do otherwise.

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May 6, 2013

Proposal Summary for Volume on Vulnerability and Ontology

A few weeks ago, Jeremy Trombley brought up the idea of publishing an edited volume on vulnerability. The idea generated a lot of interest, and, since then, Jeremy and I have been working in the background to write up an abstract to submit to Punctum Books, and to share with others who might be interested. Our aim in this project is of an interdisciplinary nature, and therefore we welcome constructive suggestions from people working in the humanities, social sciences, ecology, and more. As we continue to improve upon and finalize our manuscript proposal we welcome feedback in the form of comments or emails. Your suggestions will help us to deepen and complexify the final form of this volume.

Proposal Summary

Editors: Jeremy Trombley and Adam Robbert

Since Ernst Haeckel first coined the term “ecology” in 1866 much ecological research has emphasized the interdependent nature of all beings on Earth. But if ecology implies interdependence then another truth is evident: Ecology is precisely what makes beings vulnerable to one another at the level of their existence; ecological vulnerability opens into ontological vulnerability. In other words, the flesh that surrounds an organism—enveloping, sustaining, in part defining—is also the rupture that makes it vulnerable to the outside. Flesh is permeable. We, as fleshy beings, are therefore vulnerable, precarious, and fragile—open to the world and the other beings with whom we share it. We feel pain and we recoil. We break, we bleed, we die. This is an essential feature of our existence. To be is to be vulnerable, and this vulnerability makes us dependent upon others for sustenance, support, healing, and care.

Part one of this book addresses the philosophical aspects of vulnerability. Since vulnerabilities imply the creation of complex, evolving boundaries between beings, they also play a central role in ontological, epistemological, and ethical discourses. How are we vulnerable? Is vulnerability an ontological category? To whom or what are we vulnerable? Who do we, as unintentional creators of a new geological epoch called “The Anthropocene,” make vulnerable? These questions foreground speculative and experimental inquiries into the nature of vulnerability, and form the central themes organizing part one of this volume.

Part two explores political, economic, and cultural issues from the perspective of vulnerability. All bodies are vulnerable in radically different ways, and attending to these differences is precisely what makes vulnerability so complex. A mountain is vulnerable in ways that an animal or plant is not, and the needs of each, we may discover, are mutually exclusive. What’s more, the ways we armor ourselves against our vulnerabilities shape our personal and social lives. These armoring techniques help define social boundaries and flows of energy—material, political, psychological, or otherwise. Vulnerabilities also effect capacities within our individual lives—how we are able to express ourselves, and the limits of our expression. Vulnerabilities thus play a substantial role in shaping who we are, and define many of our roles, responsibilities, and obligations in society.

Interwoven throughout the book are personal reflections, case studies, and stories circling the collisions of ontology, vulnerability, and ecology as they manifest in the twenty-first century. These stories illuminate theoretical and empirical dimensions of vulnerability in terms of lived experience. Our goal is not to develop a total theory or representation of vulnerability and its effects, but a series of fragments, an assemblage of thoughts, concepts, and affects about vulnerability and its significance in our lives and the more-than-human world. Through these “perspicuous representations” we hope to change the way we think about our personal, social, and ecological lives by bringing vulnerability into focus, and reflecting on its effects upon the complex ecologies within which we exist.

Vulnerability can be terrifying, but it can also be beautiful and provoking. It is this openness to the world—where bodies meet in risky entanglement with one another, bonding to become something new—that makes life so wondrous. Indeed, without such openness life would be static, dull. Without such openness, there would be no caring, or compassion. Being and vulnerability thus become essential points of contemplation for thinking ecologically in our contemporary moment.

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May 6, 2013

A Panel on Latour’s Gifford Lectures

Tim Morton informs us that he will participate in a panel at this years American Academy of Religion conference alongside of William Connolly, Jane Bennett, and a host of others. The focus of the panel will be Bruno Latour’s recent Gifford Lectures, which you can watch in sequential order here.

I’ve commented before that Latour’s most recent writings express a certain stylistic and ontological sympathy with Tim’s work in Ecology Without Nature and elsewhere. In particular I found Latour’s invocation of Shelley in his paper “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World Through Art and Politics” to a have particular Morton-esque ring to it. And the overlap cuts the other way too: Latour’s decision to jettison the concept of “Nature” in his work Politics of Nature bears quite an affinity to Tim’s arguments in Ecology With Nature (though in this case Latour’s work pre-dates Morton’s by about five years).

I’ve spent a number of hours analyzing the convergences and disparities between Morton and Latour’s work, so I’m quite interested to hear how Morton might articulate these differences in the context of the Gifford Lectures series. The most striking difference is probably Morton’s turn to the non-relational dimension of objects following his encounter with Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy; there just is no corresponding idea in Latour’s ontology. But there are other interesting shifts in emphasis: Morton’s work foregrounds an explicitly psychological dimension that centers the experience of anxiety as a central ecological affect, for example, whereas in Latour we find very little in terms of psychology. Conversely, Latour’s emphasis on tracing actors-in-action is ethnographic in a way that Morton’s work just isn’t. In my essay for O-Zone one of my aims it to show that these two approaches are highly conversant, and thinking them together is of profound importance.

None of this is to imply that I’m not interested in what Connolly, Bennett, and the rest of the panel have to say, but to my mind the Morton-Latour dialogue represents a particularly interesting juncture insofar as, at least as far as I can tell, Conolly and Bennett are much more of what we might call “orthodox” Latourians than Morton could ever be. I don’t mean that with a positive or negative valence, but only to indicate that the differences between these two ecological thinkers is precisely what would make that dialogue so interesting and productive. I’m looking forward to seeing how the panel plays out.

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April 25, 2013

The Care of the Possible

Andre Ling links us to a very interesting interview with Isabelle Stengers where in part she writes: “One way of articulating what I do is that my work is not addressed to my colleagues [laughs]. This is not about contempt, but about learning to situate oneself in relation to a future—a future in which I am uncertain as to what will have become of universities. They have already died once, in the Middle Ages, with the printing press. It seems to me that this is in the process of being reproduced—in the sense that they can only exist as diplomatic institutions, not as sites for the production of knowledge. Defending them against external attacks (rankings, objective evaluation in all domains, the economy of knowledge) is not particularly compelling because of the passivity with which academics give in. This shows that it’s over. Obviously, the interesting question is: who is going to take over [prendre le relais]? At the end of the era of the mediaeval university, it was not clear who would take over. I find this notion compelling.”

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April 24, 2013

Can We Still Read?

More close readings of primary sources is the key: “I have found that, increasingly, I have to teach students to read, actually read, the words on the page in order to be able to answer simple questions about the text. I have to train them to look down at the words rather than looking at me or up at the ceiling or into their hearts in order to comprehend the meaning of the language. I have to remind them to cite passages as evidence when they answer questions, something more and more of them are unaccustomed to doing. I have to exhort them to use dictionaries to look up words they don’t know because the approach to “reading” they are so familiar with does not depend on knowing the meanings of words. Instead, they have been expected merely to offer “reader-response” answers to questions that prompt readers to react superficially to the text rather than to comprehend it. This subjective approach emphasizes loose, personal reactions to texts and interpretations that can not always be supported the text itself.”

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April 16, 2013

The Work is the Death Mask of its Conception

Walter Benjamin counsels the writer: ”In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.”

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April 15, 2013

Thank you, Mr. Graeber

Here he is on activism and conformity in the university: “Responding to anthropologists’ frequent claim that they embrace activist scholarship, he echoes Ms. Nader: “They don’t mean it” — at least when it comes truly radical activism.”If I were to generalize,” Mr. Graeber says, “I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism is a result of the bureaucratization of the university.”

And here on the need to let criticism breathe: “Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.” (Thanks to Ian Bogost for highlighting this quote.)

Professor Graeber spoke at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco just two weeks ago, but I had another commitment with the Deleuze group I am working with, so we all missed the talk. I believe that some students did record the lecture and if I can get my hands on a copy of the audio file I’ll be sure to post it here. Professor Graeber is currently promoting his new book The Democracy Project, which is sure to be a solid take on contemporary political theory and activism. For those interested I uploaded the talk he gave last year at CIIS here.

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April 15, 2013

STS on the Anthropocene

From “The Anthropocene – reflections on a concept, part I”: ”For Latour, the ‘new world’ of the Anthropocene represents a profound ontological shift in human understandings of connection and entangling with the nonhuman. The ‘arrow of time’ (as he argues here) no longer points towards emancipation from the bounds of nature through the purification of’ ‘matters of fact’, but rather towards ‘more and more entangled matters of concern’ (see also his recent Gifford Lectures on ‘natural religion‘). The Anthropocene, on this reading, is a vindication of Latourian realism.” [Via Jeremy Schmidt]

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April 10, 2013

Kim Stanley Robinson

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April 10, 2013

Latour Interviewed About His New Book

Another Turn After ANT: An Interview with Bruno Latour: ”This is a review, or preview, in the form of an interview, of Bruno Latour’s forthcoming book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. We discuss his intellectual trajectory leading up to actor–network theory and the pluralistic philosophy underlying his new, ‘positive’ anthropology of modernity.”

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April 4, 2013

The Image of Thought

Deleuze begins the third chapter of Difference and Repetition with the problem of beginnings. “Beginnings,” Deleuze believes, are paradoxical because the idea of beginning presupposes that which it excludes: something that came before the beginning. The attempt at finding a beginning in philosophy is a “very delicate problem”[1] because the idea of “the beginning” implies a starting point where all presuppositions have been eliminated. But the problem of beginnings also provides an entry way into a critique of what Deleuze calls “the image of thought.” The image of thought, for Deleuze, has been the dominate mode of philosophical thinking since Plato. In a sketch, this image gravitates towards a particular understanding of the true as easily separated from the false, a reliance on representational cognition, and the assumptions of “common sense” philosophy predicated upon a Cogitatio natural universalis.

Read the rest of this entry »

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March 31, 2013

Figure/Ground Reports on D.U.S.T.

“At a time when the arts and humanities are being squeezed ever tighter the work D.U.S.T is doing is necessary and vital. The ethos is very much D.I.Y. exactly what has occurred historically when austerity hits and the academy starts to close itself in on itself.”

A nice summary on the recent D.U.S.T (“Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought”) conference is available here.

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March 28, 2013

Speciation Intrinsic to Evolution?

“Give evolution enough time and space, they say, and new species can just happen. Speciation might not only be an evolutionary consequence of fitness differences and natural selection, but a property intrinsic to evolution, just as all matter has gravity.”

It’s a speculative and intriguing hypothesis. Read more about it here (via Matt Segall).

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March 27, 2013

The Memory of Place Paperback

Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny is now available in paperback here. I ended up buying the Kindle edition to avoid the steep price of the hardcover, but I may have to double back and pick up a physical copy now that the price has gone down. Highly recommended reading.

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March 19, 2013

Writing Urban Space Review Published

Itineration: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Rhetoric, Media, and Culture has published my review of Writing Urban Space which you can read here.

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March 18, 2013

The Question as Medium

The philosopher is tasked with the work of responding to a series of complex and evolving questions: What is being? How do we know? What is a good life? Who are we? Such inquiries are so formative in the history of philosophy that gaining a solid grip of their influence on philosophic practice is itself almost tautological: Philosophy is the pursuit (love, etymologically) of these questions, and the emergence of the right questions is in turn the wisdom or love of philosophy itself. In philosophy the role of such deep questioning has always been of central importance.

But there are also smaller questions that are easier to study as they unfold and shape the dynamics of a specific philosophical event. One such event is evidenced by the back and forth between a conference speaker and her audience. The speaker presents her material and patiently awaits a response from her peers. Here an important deconstructive moment occurs when responding to the question. The philosopher must determine what the question being asked does to the content of what she has presented. We find such practices of deconstruction widespread in philosophy. One can find, for example, a Jacques Derrida painstakingly analyzing the conditions within which questions are framed, what is made possible by the question, and what becomes inaccessible by framing inquiry in a certain way. The philosopher can decide whether the question is adequate to her content and proceed to respond based on her assessment.

The question I ask myself when observing this phenomena is how does the question impact the content of what is being said. Much ink has been spilled in twentieth century philosophy over the importance of “paradigms” (Kuhn) or “epistemes” (Foucault). To my mind the paradigm and the episteme provide deeply ecological accounts of human subject formation, and the recursive relationships enacted between human knowledge production, on the one hand, and the evolving plasticity of the human subject, on the other. For Foucault an episteme refers to the historical conditions of possibility within which the knowledge and discourse of a particular epoch is grounded. For Kuhn the paradigm refers to a very particular mode of research questioning enacted to stabilize the puzzle solving practices of “normal science.” These puzzle solving strategies have consequences for how humans and technical instruments are assembled, the goal being to refine the acceptable methods for studying a particular constellation of phenomena.

In the case of both epistemes and paradigms disruption is an always present possibility (“epistemic rupture” to crib a phrase from Gaston Bachelard, or “scientific revolution” to borrow Kuhn’s term). However, when I use the phrase “ecology of knowledge” what I am interested in is less the background conditions within which questions are framed (Foucault’s “historical a priori”) and more with giving an ontological description of the ecological relationships that emerge between the content of a philosophical statement and its encounter with a mode of questioning; or, more deeply: My concern is with the sensitive plasticity of modes of thought to different kinds of knowledges, and how these sensitivities shift during encounters with certain kinds of questions. In this sense the deconstructive moment remains an important aspect of understanding knowledge ecologies; it recovers the background of historical relations that shift in and out of different species of subjectivity.

However, beyond this archeological task, giving a descriptive ontological account of the encounter between knowledges and subjectivities is also central. (Of course there is no actual binary between the “archeological” or “deconstructive” moment and the ecological one. I am drawing a line of convenience to help organize my own thinking.) It is in this sense that I have begun to think about knowledges and questions as mediums of the kind that media ecologists interpret. In other words, just as different kinds of technological assemblages enhance, reverse, retrieve, and obsolesce different experiential possibilities within human organisms and the sensory ecology of a certain social epoch, so to can we study different kinds of questions and knowledges as mediums that reframe the ecological conditions within which human subjectivity is shaped. In fact, given the wide diversity of world views active on the planet today, I believe that giving such an ecologically descriptive account is essential to questions framed under the term “Cosmopolitics.”

A cosmopolitics of knowledge must explore and describe the influence of knowledge ecologies on human subject formation. The human organism, and possibly all organisms, is immersed not just in ecologies of other beings and constructed environments, but also within ecologies of knowledge that play every bit as profound a role in constituting the conditions of a given epoch. In this sense “the question” is an ecological actor capable of either sustaining the activity of the epoch (“normal science”) or of asking a new question, calling forward new modes of thought not yet believed possible (“epistemic rupture”). We should be able to produce an ontologically thick description — a genuinely radical empiricism — that takes into account the ecological relationships between knowledges, knowers, and questioners; and not just in terms of the episteme or paradigm, but in terms of the ongoing ecological signaling between all organisms and species of subjectivity. To the questions-themselves!

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March 14, 2013

Hyperobjects

This my friends is a proper book cover.

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March 13, 2013

Bruno Latour Wins the 2013 Holberg Prize

“French anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour has been described by the Holberg Prize Academic Committee as a creative, humorous and unpredictable researcher. The Academic Committee justifies the award for this year’s Holberg Prize by stating that ‘Bruno Latour has undertaken an ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, and has challenged fundamental concepts such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human. (…) The impact of Latour’s work is evident internationally and far beyond studies of the history of science, art history, history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, theology, literature and law.’ Latour is currently Professor at Sciences Po in Paris.”

2013 might just go down as the year of Latour. You can read more here.

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