February 14, 2010
Jan Palmowski’s Academic Vision
Concerned that this British Petroleum-sponsored coprophage stands set to inflict his chromosomally-enhanced agenda of ‘Gender and Sexuality’, ‘Global Politics, Identities, Cultures’, ‘Cities, Communities, Cultures’ and ‘Digital Cultures’ on King’s College, London, Sphaleotas urges readers to sign the petition before it’s too late.
January 12, 2010
Cretinous tirade
Graham Harman writes...
I was going to say “somehow I missed this,” but it looks as though LEVI JUST POSTED IT.
You can read it for yourself, but I’m in general agreement with the notion that a successful philosophical paradigm is one that creates plenty of work opportunities for other people. And I say this not only on the basis of practical observation, but for philosophical reasons. I’m fond of quoting Aristotle as saying that a substance is what supports different qualities at different times; it follows that something is more substantial the more it allows for non-dogmatic variation and distinct personal approaches, as long as the underlying style is the same.
Levi mentions phenomenology as a successful example. Phenomenology is out of fashion in today’s continental environment, I realize, but it had and continues to have a good run. It appealed to atheists as well as Catholics, Paris hipsters no less than German scholars, and was useful both for precise academic technicians and for freewheeling novelists.
Another example Levi didn’t mention, but with which he would surely agree, is Bruno Latour. The breadth of his impact is stunning. Almost any field can take something from Latour, at least in the humanities, and I’m generally in awe of the people who are found at Latour lectures and events: young, brilliant, working in just about any field, and also extremely gender-balanced. Actor-network-theory has snowballed well beyond Latour’s own use of it, and he has built a good-natured empire of thousands of followers. This was really brought home to me during the period when people were requesting my Prince of Networks manuscript via email. Among the many requests was one from a Department of Fishery Science.
My favorite sentence in Levi’s post is the last sentence of the following:
“The emerging phenomenologist could always contribute something new, if only in a small way, but it’s difficult to see how Badiou has created a democratic philosophy that opens new paths of research. What we instead get is dogmatic discipleship. This situation is aggravated by his celebration of axiomatics that forecloses novel paths of investigation. It’s impossible to imagine a Badiousian Lingis.”
And I also agree with this:
“The trajectory of the scientistic materialist strains of SR are pretty predictable. Here what we’re going to get are increasingly reactionary, epistemological (and superfluous) apologia to various branches of the sciences (in particular, neurology and quantum physics) that contribute little to these sciences (because they’re just doing epistemological grounding work) and that contribute even less to the various branches of the humanities. Not only is this variant of SR mostly a militant-boys-no-girls-allowed-in-our-club-house style of thought (you can thank Mel for this characterization)– the tone is pretty macho and insufferable –but the inevitable consequence of this trend is a scientistic celebration of the hard branches of the sciences that provides little in the way of the cultural sciences.”
The word “superfluous” is on target here– the sciences don’t need this. And I agree about the insufferable machismo of the tone much of the time. The culture that is growing up around that side of SR often has a nauseating sort of “tough guy” tone to it, as also mentioned yesterday in my reference to Mel Gibson’s “Passion.” But to some extent that problem is simply adopted from the culture of analytic philosophy more generally… A female friend of mine, a very talented philosopher initially in the analytic style, bailed out on one of the top analytic Ph.D. programs after a year despite doing just fine. Why? Because she was simply sickened by the let’s-tear-each-other-to-shreds-on-the-basketball-court-and-then-smoke-cigars intellectual lifestyle of that Department. There’s none of that around Latour, for instance (despite his love of cigars).
My sense is that those strains of SR will simply drift further and further from philosophy altogether toward outright (and superfluous) commentary on the sciences. Initially the interest in that quarter, for me at least, was the interesting balance struck between the hard sciences and recent French thought. But the balance has been rapidly disappearing, and it’s turning into plain old Science Wars thuggery, which is the main reason I won’t be reading Collapse as avidly as before.
Further examples of Professor Harman’s hard-hitting prose can be found in his forthcoming volume, Circus Philosophicus.
Collapse may be purchased online.
January 10, 2010
Collapse Vol. VI: Geo/Philosophy
About this Volume
Following Collapse V's inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus' deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy poses the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy's task to escape the planetary horizon?
Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought.
Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as an (or the) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract 'world' that is the condition for a 'whole' of thought?
Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions presents us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth - these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?
Collapse VI brings together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of 'planetary thought'.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY
Editorial Introduction
NICOLA MASCIANDARO
Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
Introduction to Schelling's On the World Soul
F. W. J. SCHELLING
On the World Soul (Extract)
GREG MCINERNY, DREW PURVES, RICH WILLIAMS, STEPHEN EMMOTT
New Ecologies (Interview)
TIMOTHY MORTON
Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger and the Beautiful Soul
F I E L D C L U B
How Many Slugs Maketh the Man?
OWEN HATHERLEY
Fossils of Time Future: Bunkers and Buildings from the Atlantic Wall to the South Bank
EYAL WEIZMAN
Political Plastic (Interview)
ANGELA DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN
A Given Time / A Given Place
MANABRATA GUHA
Introduction to SIMADology: Polemos in the 21st Century
REZA NEGARESTANI
Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay
ROBIN MACKAY
Philosophers' Islands
CHARLES AVERY
The Islanders: Epilogue
GILLES GRELET
Theory is Waiting
RENEÉ GREEN
Endless Dreams and Waters Between
February 20, 2009
Sphaleotas was shocked to read hurtful and wholly groundless insinuations of anti-Semitism levelled against a respected philosopher by a prominent television celebrity.
And yet, guided by the insight of thinkers as diverse as Pythagoras and Nietzsche, Chrysippus of Soli and Heraclitus of Ephesus, Gautama Buddha and Jules Henri Poincaré, is there not consolation to be had in the fact that, in a sense, we've all been here before?
May 14, 2008
Doctor’s orders
Fellow Christian Gentleman Dan Cruickshank has drawn my attention to a solo exhibition mounted by erstwhile spiritual advisor to Màlik Yimayama, Kristen Alvanson.
A keen student of all matters numerological, Sphaleotas urges your attendance.
October 28, 2007
Tell Mrs Broadhurst I can’t make it to the Red Mercury meltdown either
[...] [A]ided by the English translations which finally became available between 1980-90, the reception of [Deleuze and Guattari’s] oeuvre progressed noticeably: “In England, ‘deleuzians’ sought neither to commentate on his work, nor to apply it. They tried rather to ‘assemble with it’ – in cinema, in sculpture, in performance art, in rock music.” The Warwick philosopher, Keith Ansell-Pearson, clearly engaged with deleuzian positions and even qualifies Deleuze as a “difference engineer”.
Nick Land, a character become mythical because invisible since he abandoned teaching, also taught philosophy at the University of Warwick. He sought to connect the two volumes of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” with Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics, but also with esotericism and science-fiction. In the 90s, he organised several cultural happenings on themes like “Virtual Futures”, “Afro-Futures” and “Video-Technics”, bringing together in the same event conferences and techno-parties at the venerable University of Warwick, little-accustomed to such types of rhythm.
— François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie Croisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), pp. 568-569.
July 23, 2007
July 16, 2007
You’re fired.
Virtual Terrorism and the Internet E-learning Options
DAVID R. COLE University of Tasmania, Australia
doi: 10.2304/elea.2007.4.2.116
E-learning on the Internet is constituted by the options that this global technology gives the user. This article explores these options in terms of the lifestyle choices and decisions that the learner will make about the virtual worlds, textual meanings and cultural groupings that they will find as they learn online. This is a non-linear process that complicates dualistic approaches to e-learning, such as those which propose real/virtual distinctions. It also sets up the notion of virtual terrorism, which is explained in terms of the political forces that have come about due to e-learning. This article uses the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as a best fit in order to understand the ways in which the e-learning of the Internet options is apparent in contemporary society. Deleuze made a division between unconscious learning and apprenticeship learning, that makes sense in terms of the virtual and cultural worlds that inform the lifestyle choices on the Net. This is because the navigation of virtual worlds involves imaginative processes that are at the same time an education of the senses of the type that the apprentice will receive. Furthermore, in his work with Félix Guattari, he developed the notion of the plane of immanence, which is used to pinpoint the presence of virtual terrorism in e-learning practices.
http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/content/pdfs/4/issue4_2.asp
