Was Plato right? Julian Barbour's Platonia

See also "Schelling's Reading of the Timaeus: On Invisible Matter," HERE.

Just arrived today...

"Eumeswil, ostensibly a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, is effectively a comprehensive synthesis of Ernst Jünger's mature thought, with a particular focus on new and achievable forms of individual freedom in a technologically monitored and managed postmodern world. Here Jünger first fully develops his figure of the anarch, the inwardly liberated and outwardly pragmatic individual, who lives peacefully in the heart of Leviathan and is yet able to preserve his individuality and freedom. Composed of a series of short passages and fragments, Eumeswil follows the reflections of Martin Venator, a historian living in a futuristic city-state ruled by a dictator known as the Condor. Through Venator, the prototypical anarch, Jünger offers a broad and uniquely insightful analysis of history from the post-historic perspective and, at the same time, presents a vision of future technological developments, including astonishingly prescient descriptions of today's internet (the luminar), smartphone (the phonophore), and genetic engineering. At once a study of accommodation to tyranny and a libertarian vision of individual freedom, Eumeswil continues to speak to the contradictions and possibilities inherent in our twenty-first-century condition."

Very excited to read this newly re-published version of Ernst Jünger's Eumeswil, which is probably his greatest (science) fiction work written.  Telos Press Jünger tag search, HERE. After Nature blog post "More on Jünger," HERE.

Kant on beauty and biology, nature and art

Teaching this past fall Kant's aesthetics as presented in the third critique has really reinvigorated my love for Kant. So much so that in the course of sniffing out possible routes of research for my next big project I went ahead and purchased Opus Postumum and The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.

Let me say that in the Opus Postumum Kant indeed is a speculative philosopher, where Kant is known to have created a "post-critical" positive philosophy whose subject matter is not relegated to limits of phenomenal appearance determined by a priori categories of the human mind  Indeed, the first critique sets these limits; but the Postumum postulates...indeed speculates...beyond them.

In this post I simply wanted to mention THIS fantastic new book on Kant's aesthetics however: Thinking with Kant's Critique of Judgment.  For me personally Kant's aesthetics as presented in the third critique has some exciting leads just like the Postumum does.

From the review,

[M]any of the key terms around which Kant builds his theory of aesthetic experience, like 'beauty', 'taste', and 'pleasure', can seem outdated. More hostility still is garnered by his imperious-sounding claim that judgments of taste are 'universal' and 'necessary'. Even among those more sympathetic to his view, there arise concerns over Kant's formalism and the coherence of his analysis of the beauty of nature and art. What is more, these are only concerns internal to his aesthetics. Still other criticisms have been posed in relation to broader issues in the third Critique, like why Kant sees fit to combine an analysis of beauty with biology and how this could possibly help bridge the 'great chasm' between nature and freedom. 

Though sensitive to these criticisms, Chaouli argues that it would be a mistake to let them deter us from taking the third Critique seriously. Instead, he claims, if we 'think with' the third Critique in a way that is at once sympathetic and critical, then we will gain important insight into the distinctive nature of aesthetic experience. In this spirit, Chaouli offers a comprehensive interpretation of the third Critique that involves "wiping the dust off" Kant's seemingly outmoded concepts, "removing the malignancy" from his seemingly coercive claims, and finding a place for beauty and biology, nature and art (43).

Hayao Miyazaki: Eco-philosopher of anime

Bill Benson of New Savanna blog has up a nice post covering the ecological anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki.  During Environmental Philosophy last term I made some great use of some of Miyazaki's films which were a hit among students in the class - and Bill's post offers up some reflections which have prompted me to go back and think about these films yet again.

While I am torn as to whether Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) or Princess Mononoke (1997) are my favorites, Bill offers up an interesting point that actually makes me see these films in just a slightly different light and thus able to enjoy each even more. If I use these again while teaching I'd be sure to mention a tension that Bill identifies. For example he writes,

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is widely regarded as an ecological fable, and obviously so. And yet that doesn’t quite get it right. It seems clear that, in a general way, the world is looking bleak for humans, and I emphasis that, for humans, because of a firestorm wrought by humans 1000 years ago. There’s a poisonous jungle that’s growing larger and land suitable for human habitation is shrinking. The war between the Pegites and the Tolmekians is linked to their (mistaken) efforts to deal with this problem. Nausicaä and her people are caught between these two greater powers, whose war threatens them more than the jungle. 

Now, consider a passage from interview Miyazaki gave the day after the film opened in 1984 [Hayao Miyazaki. Starting Point: 1979-1996. San Francisco: Viz Media 2009, p. 335]:

— About the depiction of the Sea of Decay: in the early scenes, such as the village where Yupa ends up, it’s rather eerie. At the end, the Sea of Decay where Yupa and Asbel are traveling appears very bright. 

Miyazaki: We see birds that harm humans as harmful and those that are useful to humans as useful. It’s all arbitrary. The impression we have of a landscape changes depending on the emotions of the person view the landscape. Nature that is generous is, at the same time, nature that is ferocious. This is why humans feel humbled in the face of nature and why they are able to realize its true abundance. In The Dark Crystal, they talk about the earth’s surface being damaged for thousands of years. And at the end, what happens is that something like a golf course is shown. [laughs] Compared to that, the original jungle, with its multitude of inhabitants, was much livelier. I think that’s fine. So I think it’s a very strange story.

In such a world humans do not have a privileged place. How do you center a movie on humans – and this movie is surely centered on humans – in such a world? What makes their impending extinction a matter of central concern? 

Though herself human, Nausicaä would seem to be a protagonist designed for a world in which humans are not privileged. In the final sequence she is as much concerned about the baby ohmu being used as bait as she is about her people. 

Now, as I think about this, I suspect the conception I’ve outlined is a rather rickety one, that it is unstable, that there is no way it can be made fully coherent and consistent. After all, Miyazaki is a human being and his audience consists of human beings. That fact effectively assigns privilege to the humans represented in the movie. Thus, we might think we’ve found Miyazaki in a contradiction. 

And perhaps so. But surely Miyazaki-san knows that. Let me suggest that this contradiction, this instability, is a feature, not a bug. And it is that instability that Miyazaki-san’s been exploring ever since.

You can read the full post HERE.

An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz - Theory, Culture & Society Journal

Some interesting mention of the process versus object debate using essentials from Deleuze, Ruyer, and Simondon. There is a new English translation of Ruyer's book Neo-finalism now available (HERE), which I have and certainly recommend.
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An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz - Theory, Culture & Society
http://www.theoryculturesociety.org/interview-elizabeth-grosz/
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Kismet Epitome series publishes on George Bataille

Online open access HERE, free to read as is my book. Also available in paperback.  This is a good little introduction to Bataille for those who are unfamiliar with him.

See also of course Better than Food Book Reviews YouTube channel's video on Bataille.

My summer reading list

Taking these to Europe with me for two months as I plan to do alot of reading and research with the goal of beginning my next book. I'll be in Heidelberg, Germany and Lucern, Switzerland with Na as she is working on a project for her job.

I am toying with the idea of calling the book Transcendental Naturalism instead of Speculative Naturalism - I think it sounds better as a more clear statement of what the book will be about.

"Are Millennials Self-centered Jackasses?"

Being interested in cohort effects, aware of the differences between Generation-X and Millennials, and stunned by the real-world results of disturbing online social trends (such as smartphone addiction, the phenomenon of Millennials getting fired in droves,etc.) in McSweeny's styled snark here is a post that borders "You know you're a Millennial if..." " to whit. Twenty theses that questions Millennials, taken from the Internet. 

I saw these and had to post them wondering if readers out there thought any sounded more or less true. And of course, just a note that these aren't directed at anyone personally - they're just so snarky that they make you think.  I guess it doesn't help that I'm Generation-X (believe me, I'm not a Millennial "hater"), but still...pretty interesting given what is out there in the headlines.

Luckily my students these days are Generation-Z who have an different personality from the Millennials, entirely.  It's abit too early to give the Z-ers a definitive personality, but it certainly is different than the Millennials. That's for sure. On to the post.

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"Are Millennials Self-centered Jackasses?"

1. You've had your age 25 mid-life crisis and perceive anyone over 30 as old, even though you just turned 30.
2. You've traveled the world at least twice funding your coming-of-age journey through Kickstarter or various maxed out credit cards.
3. You didn't come of age because it is impossible for you to grow up, even though you are now 30 (I believe you already, you'll never get married or buy a house. You may as well be dead or retired when that happens.)
4. You are victimized by a world that mistreats you and affronts you with inappropriate and disrespectful interactions because you are expected to grow up but refuse to (see #3).
5. You believe you are profound, so profound in fact that other people can't understand you. So you ignore them.
6. You ignore people who complain about you or your bad manners.
7. It is impossible for you to get over yourself.
8. You were raised to think that you are special ("totes") and think that every criticism is an attack on you (because the world revolves around you, afterall).
9. The world is unfair and you are so depressed now. You are a victimized introvert. Reality never matches your expectations.
10. It's never your fault because the rest of the world simply doesn't realize that you are right.
11. You refuse to fix your terrible manners because #10. Ignoring DM's, emails, phone calls, or other extensions of common courtesy is due to your profundity (it couldn't be your terrible manners, right?)
12. Ignoring other people doesn't make you ignorantly indifferent and self-centered.
13. You are entitled...to everything...because it is your "right."
14. You like to photograph...everything. Including yourself.
15. You are glued to your phone like a drug-addicted lab rat, tap tap tapping your life away. (Texting, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter..."THEY ARE MY LIFE.")
16. It couldn't be that there is a rude awakening in store for you because of your childishly earnest optimism. But you have no money, no knowledge, and no real job.
17. You blame your terrible manners on "social awkwardness." Labeling yourself as "antisocial" is a cover for "social stupidity."
18. No, you are not a narcissist. You just practice "self-love."
19. You are not confused, lazy, selfish, or of the belief that only if people would coach your grandiose skills then you would finally be the star that you really are rather than an abject failure.
20. You don't need any gate-keeper's permission to go after those high goals because success will be yours on a plate.

Watch as the whale becomes itself: slowly, from land to sea, through deep time (Aeon video)

Watch as the whale becomes itself: slowly, slowly, from land to sea, through deep time.

Descending from creatures that were terrestrial and then amphibious before they were aquatic, cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) possess some of the animal kingdom’s most fascinating evolutionary histories. This video from the UK artist Jordan Collver traces the evolution of the sperm whale from the amphibious Pakicetus to its present form. After depicting six distinct points in evolutionary history, Collver morphed his still illustrations into one another, incrementally, over ten minutes. The resulting animation, Whalevolution, emphasises that a single strand of evolutionary history isn’t characterised by a series of distinct species, but rather, as Charles Darwin put it, an ‘infinitude of connecting links’.

I embedded the 25 second version above, the full ten minute version is HERE.

Iain Grant, Ray Brassier, and Robin Mackay reflect on accelerationism and the CCRU

Because the article is part of The Guardian's "long read" series - in the interest of accelerating time - I'll include below what I thought were the most interesting parts and then link to the full article below. The title is "Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in," published back on May 11.  Also involving time (because I just haven't had any) is why it took me so long to publish this post.  But please do read, alot of interesting reflections.

At any one time, there have probably only been a few dozen accelerationists in the world. The label has only been in regular use since 2010, when it was borrowed from Zelazny’s novel by Benjamin Noys, a strong critic of the movement. Yet for decades longer than more orthodox contemporary thinkers, accelerationists have been focused on many of the central questions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the rise of China; the rise of artificial intelligence; what it means to be human in an era of addictive, intrusive electronic devices; the seemingly uncontrollable flows of global markets; the power of capitalism as a network of desires; the increasingly blurred boundary between the imaginary and the factual; the resetting of our minds and bodies by ever-faster music and films; and the complicity, revulsion and excitement so many of us feel about the speed of modern life. 

... 

Noys says: “Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down” – as it has since the 2008 financial crisis – “they say it needs to be kickstarted.”...In recent years, Noys has noticed accelerationist ideas “resonating” and being “circulated” everywhere from pro-technology parts of the British left to wealthy libertarian and far-right circles in America.

...

Yet it was in France in the late 1960s that accelerationist ideas were first developed in a sustained way. Shaken by the failure of the leftwing revolt of 1968, and by the seemingly unending postwar economic boom in the west, some French Marxists decided that a new response to capitalism was needed. In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”. 

Two years later, another disillusioned French Marxist, Jean-François Lyotard, extended the argument even more provocatively. His 1974 book Libidinal Economy declared that even the oppressive aspects of capitalism were “enjoyed” by those whose lives the system reordered and accelerated. And besides, there was no alternative: “The system of capital is, when all’s said and done, natural.” 

In France, both books were controversial. Lyotard eventually disowned Libidinal Economy as his “evil book”, and moved on to other subjects. Deleuze and Guattari warned in their next book, A Thousand Plateaus, which was published in 1980 – as relatively benign postwar capitalism was being swept away by the wilder, harsher version of the Thatcher-Reagan era – that too much capitalist acceleration could suck society into “black holes” of fascism and nihilism. 

Yet in Britain, Anti-Oedipus and Libidinal Economy acquired a different status. Like much of postwar French philosophy, for decades they were ignored by the academic mainstream, as too foreign in all senses, and were not even translated into English until 1983 and 1993 respectively. But, for a tiny number of British philosophers, the two books were a revelation. Iain Hamilton Grant first came across Libidinal Economy as a master’s student at Warwick in the early 90s. “I couldn’t believe it! For a book by a Marxist to say, ‘There’s no way out of this’, meaning capitalism, and that we are all tiny pieces of engineered desire, that slot into a huge system – that’s a first, as far as I know.” Grant “got hooked”. Instead of writing his dissertation, he spent an obsessive six months producing the first English translation. 

... 

By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind”....He [Land] saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: “Disorder must increase... Any [human] organisation is ... a mere ... detour in the inexorable death-flow.”

Land gave strange, theatrical lectures: clambering over chairs as he spoke, or sitting hunched over, rocking back and forth. He also spiced his pronouncements with black humour. He would tell lecture audiences, “I work in the field of The Collapse of Western Civilisation Studies.” A quarter of a century on, some former Warwick philosophy students still talk about him with awe. Robin Mackay says, “I think he’s one of the most important philosophers of the last 50 years.”

...

At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. “One of our motives,” says Plant, “was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative” – an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view. “We wanted a more open, convoluted, complicated world, not a shiny new order.”To observe the process, and help hasten it, in 1995 Plant, Fisher, Land, Mackay and two dozen other Warwick students and academics created a radical new institution: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). It would become one of the most mythologised groups in recent British intellectual history....For decades, tantalising references to the CCRU have flitted across political and cultural websites, music and art journals, and the more cerebral parts of the style press. “There are groups of students in their 20s who re-enact our practices,” says Robin Mackay. Since 2007, he has run a respected philosophy publishing house, Urbanomic, with limited editions of old CCRU publications and new collections of CCRU writings prominent among its products....These days, Iain Hamilton Grant is an affable, middle-aged professor who wears a waistcoat with a pen in the top pocket. Yet when I asked him to describe the CCRU, he said with sudden intensity: “We made up an arrow! There was almost no disharmony. There was no leisure. We tried not to be apart from each other. No one dared let the side down. When everyone is keeping up with everyone else, the collective element increased is speed.”....Grant explained: “Something would be introduced into the group. Neuromancer [William Gibson’s 1984 novel about the internet and artificial intelligence] got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You’d find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room.” 

... 

Even inside the permissive Warwick philosophy department, the CCRU’s ever more blatant disdain for standard academic practice became an issue. Ray Brassier watched it happen. Now an internationally known philosopher at the American University in Beirut, between 1995 and 2001 he was a part-time mature student at Warwick. 

“I was interested in the CCRU, but sceptical,” Brassier says. “I was a bit older than most of them. The CCRU felt they were plunging into something bigger than academia, and they did put their finger on a lot of things that had started to happen in the world. But their work was also frustrating. They would cheerfully acknowledge the thinness of their research: ‘It’s not about knowledge.’ Yet if thinking is just connecting things, of course it’s exciting, like taking amphetamines. But thinking is also about disconnecting things.” 

Brassier says that the CCRU became a “very divisive” presence in the philosophy department. “Most of the department really hated and despised Nick – and that hatred extended to his students.” There were increasingly blunt bureaucratic disputes about the CCRU’s research, and how, if at all, it should be externally regulated and assessed. In 1997, [Sadie] Plant resigned from the university. “The charged personal, political and philosophical dynamics of the CCRU were irresistible to many, but I felt stifled and had to get out,” she told me. 

... 

After his [Land's] breakdown, Land left Britain. He moved to Taiwan “early in the new millennium”, he told me, then to Shanghai “a couple of years later”. He still lives there now. “Life as an outsider was a relief.” China was also thrilling. In a 2004 article for the Shanghai Star, an English-language paper, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known”. At Warwick, he and the CCRU had often written excitedly, but with little actual detail, about what they called “neo-China”. Once he lived there, Land told me, he realised that “to a massive degree” China was already an accelerationist society: fixated by the future and changing at speed. Presented with the sweeping projects of the Chinese state, his previous, libertarian contempt for the capabilities of governments fell away. 

... 

In 1970, the American writer Alvin Toffler, an exponent of accelerationism’s more playful intellectual cousin, futurology, published Future Shock, a book about the possibilities and dangers of new technology. Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryonics, cloning and robots working behind airline check-in desks. “The pace of change accelerates,” concluded a documentary version of the book, with a slightly hammy voiceover by Orson Welles. “We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history – the birth of a new civilisation.” 

Shortly afterwards, the 1973 oil crisis struck. World capitalism did not accelerate again for almost a decade. For much of the “new civilisation” Toffler promised, we are still waiting. But Future Shock has sold millions of copies anyway. One day an accelerationist may do the same.

Link to the full article HERE.

Download the introduction to Avanessian's and Mackay's #Accelerationist Reader (.pdf)

On Avanessian's academia.edu page HERE, or back-up link HERE.

Download the introduction to Quentin Meillassoux's Time without Becoming (.pdf)

HERE.

Ernst Jünger’s The Worker: Dominion and Form (new book)

Written in 1932, just before the fall of the Weimar Republic and on the eve of the Nazi accession to power, Ernst Jünger’s The Worker: Dominion and Form articulates a trenchant critique of bourgeois liberalism and seeks to identify the form characteristic of the modern age. Jünger’s analyses, written in critical dialogue with Marx, are inspired by a profound intuition of the movement of history and an insightful interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. 

Martin Heidegger considered Jünger “the only genuine follower of Nietzsche,” singularly providing “an interpretation which took shape in the domain of that metaphysics which already determines our epoch, even against our knowledge; this metaphysics is Nietzsche's doctrine of the ‘will to power.’” In The Worker, Jünger examines some of the defining questions of that epoch: the nature of individuality, society, and the state; morality, justice, and law; and the relationships between freedom and power and between technology and nature. 

This work, appearing in its entirety in English translation for the first time, is an important contribution to debates on work, technology, and politics by one of the most controversial German intellectuals of the twentieth century. Not merely of historical interest, The Worker carries a vital message for contemporary debates about world economy, political stability, and equality in our own age, one marked by unsettling parallels to the 1930s.

Link HERE.

Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene (new book)

This book examines the work of Ernst Jünger and its effect on the development of Martin Heidegger’s influential philosophy of technology. Vincent Blok offers a unique treatment of Jünger’s philosophy and his conception of the age of technology, in which both world and man appear in terms of their functionality and efficiency. The primary objective of Jünger’s novels and essays is to make the transition from the totally mobilized world of the 20th century toward a world in which a new type of man represents the gestalt of the worker and is responsive to this new age. Blok proceeds to demonstrate Jünger’s influence on Heidegger’s analysis of the technological age in his later work, as well as Heidegger’s conceptions of will, work and gestalt at the beginning of the 1930s. At the same time, Blok evaluates Heidegger’s criticism of Jünger and provides a novel interpretation of the Jünger-Heidegger connection: that Jünger’s work in fact testifies to a transformation of our relationship to language and conceptualizes the future in terms of the Anthropocene. This book, which arrives alongside several new English-language translations of Jünger’s work, will interest scholars of 20th-century continental philosophy, Heidegger, and the history of philosophy of technology.

A hefty price tag but the eBook is obviously cheaper. Link HERE.

Christopher Roth's and Armen Avanessian's HYPERSTITION (video)

Happened to come across a trailer that I somehow missed last year for Roth's and Avanessian's Hyperstition (2016).  On their Vimeo page there is a fifteen minute excerpt of the hour and forty three minute film which can be streamed on demand for $4.99.  Unfortunately due to privacy settings I can't embed that here but I can embed the trailer.


Hyperstition Trailer Who? from Christopher Roth on Vimeo .

On Ernst Junger and Yukio Mishima (Better than Food Book Reviews)

I recently discoverd a great YouTube channel called Better than Food: Book Reviews. The host (Clifford Lee Sargent) and I apparently have nearly identical tastes in literature - and so alot of the reviews are of books that I enjoy quite abit. He also had his first podcast with Greg Sadler (also quite famous from YouTube); Greg was a pleasure to speak with when I consulted him about possibly transitioning After Nature from blog to vlog.

Astonishingly, Clifford is also one of the few folks out there who appreciates in the German philosopher and literary figure, Ernst Juenger, what I do.  Namely, he does not so much look at Juenger as a mere conservative political figure as much as he does see him as a philosopher whose mode of operation is literature (perhaps like Bataille, another philosopher whom we both enjoy) and whose ideas are neither right nor left per se.  One may wish to consult Juenger's figure of the "anarch" in his science fiction masterpiece Eumeswil (1977) or even his political critique found in On the Marble Cliffs (1939) to see how this is the case.

Just a note that Juenger's philosophical observations were well, well ahead of his time, especially concerning his predictions about scientific technology, which is what makes him so important for NrX or "right accelerationism" (he predicted the iPhone, which he called the "phonophore," the internet which he called the "datasphere," and so on). I am going to post below a link to a documentary about Juenger where this is discussed in the second half. It is really worth watching and is actually the best documentary about Juenger that I have come across so far.  I should mention that in the documentary according to Juenger we will move from the age of the Titans to the gods by the 2200's - which for him means a union of humans and machine, accelerating intelligence, singularity, and encounter with extra-human forms of intelligence. Very interesting to hear.

Clifford also reviewed Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel (1968) - which was great - as recently I've been obsessed with Mishima, and so I'll include some videos embedded below about him as well.

Of the Wand and the Moon "A Cancer Called Love"

Exclusive and unreleased track care of Kim Larsen. Also check out his new project called White Chamber which is, in Kim's words, "Dark electronic music inspired by the 80's, John Carpenter and more." First, though, is a great track by his long-term project Of the Wand and the Moon - with a great song called "A Cancer Called Love" recorded at The Lone Descent album sessions back from 2011.

Of the Wand and the Moon "A Cancer Called Love" lyrics

I used to make long speeches to you after you left.

I used to talk to you all the time, even though I was alone.

I walked around for months talking to you.

Now I don't know what to say.

It was easier when I just imagined you.

I even imagined you talking back to me.

We'd have long conversations, the two of us.

lt was almost like you were there.

I could hear you, I could see you, smell you.

I could hear your voice. Sometimes your voice would wake me up.

It would wake me up in the middle of the night, just like you were in the room with me.

Then... it slowly faded.

I couldn't picture you anymore.

I tried to talk out loud to you like I used to, but there was nothing there.

I couldn't hear you.

Then... I just gave it up.

Everything stopped.

You just... disappeared.

And now I'm working here.

I hear your voice all the time.

Jägerblut "Hunting"

Jägerblut "Hunting" lyrics, from the album 1896-1906 (UMB label, CD released 2007)

Leave concrete, mortar, brick behind

We are naked, two of one kind

We touch the dirty ground beneath

Worm and beetle greet us: we breathe

Into forest, up the trees

Down the lake and into seas

Burn the fire, eat the ground

Walk in spirals round and round

Talk to spirits, trapped and bound

Into forest, up the trees

Down the lake and into seas

Eat the fire, burn the ground

Walk in spirals round and round

Far from cities people, hate

The dawn is near, the hour late

The moon is grinning in the sky

We come to run, we come to fly

We come to hunt, we come to die

Mist is rising, come and see

Come my darling, lie with me

Soon we'll be rotting in the earth

We'll be free: I'll be you and you'll be me

A brilliant feast for wolf and snake

A monstrous wind the woods shall shake

A monstrous wind the world will take

A hunter in the forest wake

Rain is falling endlessly

Come my darling hunt with me

You hunt me: I will be you

Bataille’s Revenge

Craig H. blogs about Bataille and much more, as linked below. Recently I've been reading quite abit of Bataille, actually - due to my recent foray into the accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land. Bataille's Nietzschean aesthetics of intensity reminds me very much of the 20th century German literatur Ernst Juenger, and as I've mentioned before Juenger's thought - mostly in essays such as "Total Mobilization" but moreso his treatise The Worker: Dominion and Form - could very well be a hidden gem of so-called "right" accelerationist philosophy, whatever that might mean. 

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Bataille's Revenge
// Technocommercium

In truth, Bataille seems to me far less an intellectual predicament than a sexual and religious one, transecting the lethargic suicide upon which we are all embarked. To accept his writings is an impossibility, to resist them an irrelevance. One is excited abnormally, appalled, but without refuge. Nausea perhaps? —Nick Land, A Thirst for Annihilation … Continue reading Bataille's Revenge

Technosphere Magazine

“Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future. 

The technosphere is the defining matrix and main driver behind the ongoing transition of this planet into the new geological epoch of humankind, the Anthropocene. Stemming from the ubiquity of human culture and global technologies, it forms a new and highly dynamic component of the Earth system, amorphous in its gestalt yet powerful in altering the history of this planet and the conditions for life on it. Mobilizing and transforming massive amounts of materials and energy, it is comparable in scale and function to other terrestrial spheres such as the bio- and hydrosphere, with which it connects and intersects. Put differently, it constitutes a form of a higher ecology generated by the cumulative interweaving of technologies and natural environments to the point where both become inseparable. 

Manifest since at least the mid-twentieth century with the onset of the “Great Acceleration,” the technosphere has now reached an enormous, not yet determinate potential to alter the surface of the Earth as well as its great depths – from the orbital level to the deep sea. Owing to the capability of a single species to actuate technics that radically transform our planet, the technosphere thus represents a steep rupture and a qualitative shift in the way our planet has functioned for millions of years. How does the technosphere operate? How does it reorganize and re-functionalize the physicality and chemistry of living and non-living matter? And how does it change the ways we perceive the world?” 

“Technosphere Magazine maps out specific dimensions, condensations, aggregations, “apparatuses,” problematics, conflict zones, ruptures, and operational failures, through and by which the technosphere becomes visible.” (from Editorial)

Editors-in-chief: Katrin Klingan, Christoph Rosol
Editorial team: Nick Houde, Anna Luhn (-2016), Christoph Rosol, Johanna Schindler, Mira Witte
Illustrations: Nina Jäger
Publisher Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, 2016-19
Open access

Monoskop link HERE.

Ray Brassier "Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis" (Continental and Analytic Kantianism: the Legacy of Kant in Meillassoux’s and Sellars’ Realism) - UCD 2016

Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible

This looks amazing. Very, very excited for this book (Amazon link HERE for pre-ordering).

Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible by Didier Debaise. I would love to review this.  Wow!

UPDATE: To After Nature readers who wrote in: No, this is not the book published through the Edinburgh University Press Speculative Realism series.  Thankfully Debaise had enough sense to publish this through Duke University Press which is eminently more respectable and legitimate given that Duke's editors actually are consummate professionals (as editors should be).

Saito's Everyday Aesthetics revisited

For those interested in aesthetics, the below post from Aesthetics Today blog discusses Saito's influential book (as well as some pretty important connections to philosophers such as John Dewey in an "aesthetics of the everyday.")

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Saito's Everyday Aesthetics revisited: call for the in-between
// Aesthetics Today

So it has been ten years since Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007) came out, a seminal work in the burgeoning new field of everyday aesthetics.  She will be having a new book on the topic coming out soon.  But perhaps now is a time to revisit some of the issues raised especially in the first chapter of Everyday Aesthetics with the understanding that this is not necessarily her current position.  The chapter is titled "Neglect of Everyday Aesthetics."  It is available here.  Most of what Saito says in this chapter I agree with and it should be understood that the purpose of this post is simply to use her piece as a jumping off point for reflection, as I have in the past.  Saito makes a strong distinction between two kinds of experience in everyday aesthetics. One kind is the "stand out" experience, roughly similar to Dewey's idea of "an experience."  The second is another set of reactions we might and often do have to sensuous and/or design qualities of objects.  These would include the reaction of seeing an object as dirty and wishing to clean it up.

I accept Saito's expansion of the concept of the aesthetic to include these kinds of responses.  There is a dialogue going on here since Saito may have been partly inspired in this by an early article of mine on neatness and messiness as aesthetic qualities. "Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities:  'Neat,' 'Messy,' 'Clean,' 'Dirty'," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism53:3 (1995) 259-268.  Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Human Environments  ed Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (:  Broadview Press, 2007).  What I currently want to push is an in-between dimension of aesthetic experience, something between the two extremes Saito posits:  a domain that I believe is fundamentally important not only for everyday aesthetics but for aesthetics in general.  In the tradition of Karl Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and John Dewey in Art as Experience, but also of Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, I want to call for expansion of this in-between domain, one that overcomes the alienation (usually based on exploitation as Marx would put it, or inadequate social arrangements as Dewey would put it) that characterizes experience at the low or "practical" end of the aesthetic spectrum.  I also see the three levels of aesthetic experience,  (1) the practical, (3) what I will call, after Buddhist thought, the mindful, and (4) the special/extraordinary, as dynamically inter-related.   So, whereas Saito favors a dichotomy between spectator-like experiences and experiences that "prompt us toward actions, such as cleaning, discarding, purchasing..."  I posit this, the middle "mindfulness," realm.  Following Nhat Hanh in his discussion of washing dishes with mindfulness and Marx in his notion of non-alienated labor, I think that there is a problem at the lowest level of the aesthetic:  a problem if the cleaning or discarding is not mindful, the purchasing is based on false consciousness in a society of consumerism (as critical theorist followers of Marx argued), and so on.  Low level activities of the sort that happen when one cleans for entirely functional purposes or purchases clothes just for comfort, usefulness, or getting ahead, become enhanced when they are are mindful of aesthetic qualities. This means that I favor a notion of low-level contemplation, for example contemplative as opposed to mindless shopping. Whereas Saito associates the idea of contemplation only with the high level experience of fine art experience or contemplation of natural beauty, I think that mindful washing of dishes, for example, is contemplative in its own way.  

One difficulty here is that Saito associates contemplation and disinterestedness with rejection of the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch.  This is not my approach:  I see contemplation as applicable to multi-sensory experience.  Contemplative aesthetic experience of sexual intimacy for example is the preferred mode. Thus, on my view, one can take an aesthetic attitude towards everyday phenomena, and that this can be a more valuable, actually is generally a more valuable, way to approach such phenomena, as long as it does not interfere with getting the job done.

Actually, then, I disagree with the notion that actions such as cleaning, discarding, and purchasing without any contemplative dimension are "typically the way in which aesthetics functions in everyday life."  They may in fact be typically the way in Western alienated capitalist society.  But they may not be in other societies, for example in Denmark or Bhutan.  Moreover, a better society would be one in which the contemplative or disinterested dimension of aesthetic experience of the everyday would be enhanced.  So, to put the point in another way, when Saito says that she wants to include not only aesthetic experiences of art, however broadly defined, but also "those responses that propel us toward everyday decisions and actions without any accompanying contemplative appreciation" (11) I would count this domain as, yes, aesthetic, but only at the very lowest level, and not something to be encouraged.  It is at the mid-level, where responses such as cleaning and choosing are not "almost automatic" as Saito puts it, but are mindful and at least minimally examples of contemplative appreciation because mindful of aesthetic qualities, that a happy life is constituted.  (I also think that other things that Saito says in her first chapter are actually more in accord with this position.) 

I understand the motive behind Saito's dichotomy: the need to move away from the hierarchy in which everything is seen in terms of Western fine art.  Saito eloquently demolishes that position. What I am offering is hopefully the dialectical next stage.  As with Saito, I also think my approach being more in accord with a multi-cultural, global viewpoint.  But this is because I think that in most traditional or tribal cultures, and in many other non-Western cultures, the middle, mindful, aesthetic domain, plays a more important role in life.  I agree with those people who believe that we should be more like the Navajo or the Bali people in their approaches to aesthetic experience, as much as we can given the Western-based world that surrounds us.  It is the Western mindset that promotes the dichotomy of humdrum practical vs. high art aesthetic.  I think that ultimately both Saito and I wish to undercut this dichotomy.

I also agree with Saito in attacking the tendency to see the aesthetic either as "highly specialized and isolated from our daily concerns, namely art, or else something trivial and frivolous, not essential to our lives, such as beautification and decoration" (12) and I agree that the low-level experiences that we are both interested in are important for practical purposes.  

However, although we both want to "restore aesthetics to its proper place in our everyday life" (12) and reclaim its status in shaping the world, I wish to do so by encouraging and enhancing mindful and contemplative approaches to the everyday, whereas Saito is concerned that these approaches are too associated with an art-centered approach to aesthetics.  I agree that art-centered aesthetics can "compromise the rich diversity of out aesthetic life" but am not convinced that it always does.  Nor am I convinced that what she calls "experience-oriented aesthetics" (12) is detrimental to a sound everyday aesthetics as long as "experience" is not just understood in such a way as to privilege the distal senses or extreme forms of disinterested approaches to aesthetic objects. 

I also agree with Saito that "art is almost always regarded [in Western aesthetic theory] as the quintessential model for an aesthetic object" (13) and I believe that she is absolutely right to pursue this line.  (This makes me consistent with her quote from my 1995 article in support of her position, thank goodness.)  Saito presents an excellent discussion of the problems of art-centered aesthetics in the section with that name.  

My only caveat would be a response to Korsmeyer's approach to the aesthetics of food. Saito quotes Korsmeyer with approval as saying "the addition of taste and food to the domain of established aesthetic theory presents problems:  both inevitably come off as distinctly second rate, trailing the distance senses and fine art."  I just cannot agree that it is never right to understand food in terms of fine art:  my own view that something like the El Bulli dining experience is at the same level of high art as the best example of Japanese tea ceremony, and for the same reasons.  We must not turn our Western prejudices against the proximal senses into a determination of what makes fine art:  i.e. that fine art must use the distant senses. 

Nor do we have to see all food preparation as fine art in order to concede that some really is.  Those who see the highest level Michelin star type dining experiences as somehow second-rate in relation to fine art painting for example are missing the point.   Saito further quotes Korsmeyer that "the concept of art, dominated as it is today by the idea of fine art, is a poor category to capture the nature of foods and their consumption." (17)  This just seems a category mistake since food as a category is broad like photography as a category.  Most photography is not art, and even less is fine art, and yet this does not mean that photography cannot be fine art. Similarly if we want to broadly capture the nature of foods and their consumption it would be best to focus not on El Bulli but on the vast number of practices involving food.  I would venture to say that virtually any social practice:  dance, food, music, video games, advertising, religious ritual, etc., can have a fine art manifestation (can be a product of genius, in Kant's sense).  But most dance, food, music, etc. is not fine art.  In any case, I would not want to, as Korsmeyer puts it, "divert attention from the interesting ways in which the aesthetic importance of foods diverges from parallel values in art." (18)  Of course one of the things that food as fine art does is focus our attention on such "interesting ways" just as dance as fine art focuses our attention on features of dance that differentiate it from other art forms.       

Saito further quotes Wolfgang Welsh as holding that sport, for example, "cannot substitute for Schonberg, Pollock, or Goddard" which, in my view, is just plain silly, since (1) no one is calling for substitution, and (2) the correct comparison class is master artists. It is not sports against Pollock, but Pollock compared to the El Bulli master chef, Adria. 

Saito is also excellent in his list of various things that are associated with the paradigms of classical Western art and which do not apply to everyday aesthetics.  Putting the point negatively, she says that there are various features that make certain everyday aesthetic phenomena non-art, like "absence of definite and identifiable object-hood and authorship, our literal engagement, transience and impermanence of the object, and the primacy of practical values of the object" (17) although I am somewhat concerned about the notion of "primacy of practical values" which can be interpreted in different ways.  

Saito's discussion of frames as unique to art as opposed to everyday aesthetics is of particular interest.  Ronald Hepburn had once noted that non-art objects are frame-less and that we then become the creator of the aesthetic object:  the frameless character can, as Saito puts it, "be compensated by exercising our imagination and creativity in constituting the aesthetic object as we see fit." (19)  I agree with this, but then I also think that this means that we are then virtually framing the object and thereby treating it as if it were a work of art at least in respect to being something that is now unified and has an imaginative/creative dimension, although this time introduced to some extent by ourselves as viewers.  This is why I say in my book that artists are the greatest experts in the aesthetics of everyday life.  They are constantly seeing landscapes for example as if they were works of art by framing them and exercising their imaginations in the process.  It is interesting in this regard that Saito's examples of such framing (a baseball game, the streets of New York, and drinking tea) read like a poet's appreciation of these things.  She has a fine poetic sensibility.  But poetry is an art form.  Moreover, when she says "in appreciating the smell and taste of green tea, I may incorporate the visual and tactile sensation of the tea bowl, as well as the sound of slurping" I note that this is exactly how one ought to appreciate tea in the setting of the Japanese tea ceremony, which Saito elsewhere recognizes to be an art form. (15)  

Saito admits that "In constructing the object of our aesthetic experience in these cases, we do select and specifically attend to certain ingredients in our perceptual field, just as we do when we appreciate art as art." (19)  The difference in her mind is that, in art, we determine this based on social convention and "institutional agreement" not on the basis of "our personal preference, taste, and inclination."  And she is right at least in that there is some greater degree of institutional agreement in the realm of art, but it strikes me that this is only a matter of degree and that there certainly a lot of relying on "our own imagination, judgment, and aesthetic taste as our guide" in art as much as in everyday life. Moreover, as Saito herself has described, there are some everyday practices that involve a lot of institutional agreement, for example sports and cat beauty contests.

quote of the day

"That which is falling should also be pushed."

- Friedrich Nietzsche