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Category: New Materialisms

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 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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March 12, 2013

William Connolly: The Fragility of Things

William Connolly’s new book will be published soon. Progressive Geographies has more details here.

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February 26, 2013

Making the Geologic Now

GeoNow_Front-Cover_web

In the 1870s Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani made a radical argument: we can no longer justifiably call our geological age the Holocene. Instead, Stoppani argued, geologists must concede that human behavior had caused enough radical change in the functioning of the Earth to warrant the naming of a new era. He suggested the term “Anthropozoic” to describe this new world. The name did not stick. But in the year 2000 something similar happened with quite different results. Dutch Chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen began to publicly admonish his colleagues use of the word “Holocene.” Again, Crutzen argued that humans had caused enough change to the Earth’s geological systems to warrant a new epoch. He called it the “Anthropocene.” This time the notion struck the scientific community with greater weight, and Cutzen published a paper on the idea in a 2002 issue of the journal Nature. Where Stoppani’s colleagues had found the idea of the “Anthropozoic” unscientific Crutzen’s were willing to investigate. Since then the Anthropocene has become an increasingly used term to describe the intersection of human behavior with the deep structures of the Earth’s evolving dynamics.

This history forms the context within which Making the Geologic Now, a new volume from Punctum Press, begins its investigations. The book itself looks like a hybrid entity — think of an issue of Adbusters magazine (though less threatening) or McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global Village (though with broader range) and you’ll have a feel for the form of this text. The aesthetic is overwhelming at times, but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. This is after all a text about all things earthly, and in the Anthropocene that means a multimedia object about a “teeming assemblage of exchange and interaction among the bio, geo, cosmo, socio, political, economic, strategic, and imaginary” (23). While cluttered in places the volume is nevertheless an attractive enactment of the ideas it presents, and it doesn’t hurt that the book merges with an online presence of the same name (geologicnow.com). Like other Punctum books this one is also available as a free download and a purchasable hardcopy.

As Jane Bennett notes in her afterward to the volume, the essays, images, and artifacts found in the text form “speculative devices” of a sort by which we might better tune towards the geologic as a condition or medium within which human thinking and practice must be understood. The Anthropocene, Bennett tacitly suggests, implies “a certain convergence between two styles of temporality that we had formerly thought were distinct” (244). Bennett is referring to the intersection of geological deep time with that of human historical time. The book is thus aiming to enact cognitive shifts in human thinking and practice so as to “make monumentally slow change palpable” (20) suggesting that thinking the geologic is a difficult but conditional task for our present time. The editors write: “By making a geologic turn, we direct sensory, linguistic, and imaginative attention toward the material vitality of the earth itself” (25).

I’m looking forward to continuing to engage with this text and its more than forty or so entries (I’ve only gotten through a handful of them myself), and to joining the writers in asking, “What might become thinkable and possible, if we humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer — as our partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences?” (18) While I don’t have a straightforward answer to the question what’s clear to me already is that, much like other works in this genre such as Bennett’s Vibrant Matter or Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, this text presents complex ideas in a form and style that will be appealing to a variety of audiences: academics and non-academics, undergraduates and senior Ph.D. candidates, or even designers, architects, engineers, policy makers, and artists.

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February 2, 2013

More Info on the Rhizomes Issue w/ Karen Barad

Special Issue: Quantum Possibilities: The Work Of Karen Barad

Edited by Peta Hinton (University of New South Wales, Australia), Michael O’Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin, Ireland) and Karin Sellberg (The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom).

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January 7, 2013

Jane Bennett: Earthling, Now and Forever?

Full text available here.

“Indeed, I think that one of the events that the idea of Anthropocene tries to capture is a certain convergence between two styles of temporality that we had formerly thought were distinct. The first style we had associated with the apersonal geologic: this was a bi-modal time of either a breakneck and explosively transformative speed (lightning, earthquake, wildfire) or an implacably slow, deep time (sedimentation, erosion, radioactive decay). The second style of temporality we identified as prototypically human: this was the more moderate, midrange speed of human endeavor, the enactment of intention or plan, the time of the everyday. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the superfast impact of the atomic bombs the Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or (what many believed to be) the gradual accretion of human knowledge throughout history. The idea of the Anthropocene, however, suggests that the exceptions are not exceptional and that there is little reason to posit a hard, ontological dichotomy between human and ahuman forces, with regard to their temporalities or scope of effect.”

– Jane Bennett

 

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December 12, 2012

Speculative Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene

It’s a sort of experimental title that begins to explain itself simply by unpacking each of its terms. “Speculative” (or “speculation” more generally) means “contemplation,” “seeing,” or “observing.” It’s also a term used when transactions involve a considerable risk or unknown outcome. So one could say that “speculation” is the art or practice of risky contemplation. The second word, “ecology,” likewise has a variety of meanings. As a whole the word refers to the branch of science dealing with organisms, environments, and their coevolution. Of course the “eco” comes from “oikos” which is greek for “home” or “dwelling place,” and the “logy” usually means something like the science, discourse, or theory “of” something; sometimes the “logy” refers to the verb “legein”—“to speak”—which of course relates to the greek “logos” which can variously mean “reason” or “divine word,” and so forth. So “ecology,” then, is the logos of dwelling—perhaps almost always in a coevolutionary context—for what are beings dwelling in besides other beings! We could then define “Speculative Ecology” as the risky contemplation of the coevolutionary logos of inter-dwelling beings. Good things at work here.

We could perform a similar exercise with the word “Anthropocene.” “Anthropos” commonly means “man” (yes, how ridiculously gendered), and, more appropriately, “human being.” But it also has a more interesting history, because it can also be explained as a combination of “aner” and “ops” or “eye” and “face” so that the “Anthropos” is that which has a face and can see. I suppose, then, that the very concept of “Anthropos” could be extended to nonhumans, and, by extension, could afford something like “personhood” to all those other creatures as well—but it would have to be a kind of ecological personhood not limited to human likeness. “Cene,” on the other hand, refers to geological periods in the Earth’s history. So “Anthropocene” could mean something like the epoch in Earth’s history when ecological personhood emerges on a global scale. Taken together, then, “Speculative Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene” would literally mean the risky contemplation of the coevolutionary logos of inter-dwelling beings in the age of ecological personhood. I think this is an entirely appropriate description of the task at hand: As the environmental humanities begin to realize that the face of the other is just as present in nonhumans as it is in humans I think we could use a bit more Speculative Ecology!

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November 27, 2012

Intra-actions and Strange Strangers

The folks over at Rhizomes have posted the description for their upcoming volume on the work of Karen Barad HERE. Below is the title and abstract for my contribution.

Title: Intra-actions and Strange Strangers: Karen Barad Meets the Ecological Thought.

Abstract: By coining the term “intra-action” Karen Barad seeks to overturn the metaphysics of individualism—the general view that individuals pre-exist their contexts and interactions—by placing relations at the center of her metaphysical inquiry. The term intra-action has subsequently been adopted by Donna Haraway to describe the multispecies entanglements “through which entities, subjects, and objects come into being.” In contrast to these views, Tim Morton has proposed the concept of “strange strangers,” a precursor to his more recent work in object-oriented ontology. While Barad’s critique of the metaphysics of individualism targets a certain understanding of the ontological status of individuals, this paper argues that Tim Morton’s object-oriented approach—which emphasizes the withdrawn and irreducible nature of individual substances—offers an important complement to the intra-active approach to ecology and ethology. This paper proceeds by way of comparative analysis: First, by outlining Barad’s intra-active philosophy, and second by contrasting this view with Morton’s object-oriented ontology. The paper takes a pluralist approach that applies the best of both views in service of deeper ecological thinking.

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October 29, 2012

A Note on My Barad Essay

A few weeks ago I posted Part 1 of what was going to be a two-part essay on Karen Barad’s work Meeting the Universe Halfway. Since then I’ve had the good fortune of being invited to contribute an essay to a forthcoming issue of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge which will deal with Karen Barad’s work at length. Because of this I have tabled posting Part 2 of my Barad essay and instead will focus my efforts on the publication, which will be of a longer length and will better sustain the kind of detailed work that Barad is doing. So, I haven’t forgotten about the essay it’s just got a new (better) venue.

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October 15, 2012

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

The latest in the Open Humanities Press series in New Metaphysics, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, is now available for free online HERE.

It looks like the print version will follow soon.

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October 7, 2012

Thinking With Barad Part 1: Philosophy Physics and Posthuman Performativity

In between work and other writing commitments I have been slowly chipping away at Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. My original intent was to post or publish a full essay on Barad’s work and how it interfaces with various other new materialisms, speculative realisms, and object-oriented philosophies. However, because Barad’s work has become a central topic of discussion recently it seems apt to post my take on her work sooner rather than later. I’m posting my review of her book in two parts: Part 1 will focus on setting up Barad’s “ontoepistemology” (her term) and will introduce some of her central influences. In Part 2 I will focus on discussing Barad’s work in relation to other contemporary philosophical developments in ontology. Part 1 is posted below and I hope to have Part 2 up within a week or two.

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June 18, 2012

Barad’s Agential Realism (Part 2)

Another paragraph from the essay on Meeting the Universe Halfway that I am slowly putting together:

There is no doubt that Butler’s work on performativity features as a strong influence in Barad’s book; by extension, Foucault’s analysis of regulatory power and discursive practices feature here as well (cf. pp. 133 – 135 and pp. 145 – 153). If Butler’s work can in some sense be seen as a deepening of Foucault’s, we might likewise see some of Barad’s work as an extension of Butler’s (to be sure all three make important contributions on their own, but a lineage of sorts can be detected nevertheless). The best part of Barad’s reading of Butler and Foucault is that it’s written in the mode of a generous critique. Barad’s intent is stated in advance, “One of my main aims is to contribute to efforts to sharpen the theoretical tool of performativity for science studies and feminist theory endeavors alike, and to promote their mutual consideration” (pp. 135 – 136). Barad continues, “Crucially, an agential realist elaboration of performativity allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing intra-activity” (p. 136). These quotations reveal Barad’s sympathy towards performativity, and the means by which she seeks to extend it. Pivotal to this extension is Barad’s serious engagement with ontology—with reconceptualizing how we consider matter and agency. In this regard, “The space of agency is not only substantially larger than that allowed for in Butler’s performative account, for example, but also, perhaps rather surprisingly, larger than what liberal humanism proposes” (pp. 177 – 178).

 

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June 8, 2012

Barad’s Agential Realism

I’m just about finished with a review of Karan Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway. The book was published back in 2007, but I am still going to shop the review around to see if anyone will publish it. Here’s a small bit from my review dealing with Butler and Foucault:

Barad’s move towards an extended account of performativity is captured in her proposed “posthumanist performative” framework (p. 135). Posthumanist performativity offers an, “approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism” (p. 135). We might then view Barad’s posthumanism as an appreciation for the way performativity has refigured representational theories of truth (by understanding them as the outcomes of material-discursive practices enacted by situated actors), but also as an expansion for what’s missing in the critical theories of Butler and Foucault (namely, a greater focus on nonhuman materiality). In this regard, one of Barad’s unique contributions is a refiguring of Foucault’s notion of the “apparatus” (or “dispositif”). The critique reads thusly, “for both Butler and Foucault, agency belongs only to the human domain, and neither addresses the nature of technoscientific practices and their profoundly productive effects on human bodies, as well as the ways in which these practices are deeply implicated in what constitutes the human, and more generally the workings of power” (pp. 145 – 146). Further, in terms of Barad’s agential realism Foucault’s discursive practices are extended so that, “agential realism’s posthumanist account of discursive practices does not fix the boundary between human and nonhuman before the analysis ever gets off the ground, but rather allows for the possibility of a genealogical analysis of the material-discursive emergence of the human” (pp. 149 – 150).

If I can’t find a publisher for the review I’ll be sure to post the whole paper up here. In general I am very sympathetic to Barad’s work, and only have a few criticisms here and there.

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