Category: philosophy

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Sue Ruddick ~ reading & writing in a materialist way

There’s a free to access commentary on the Society and Space website by Sue Ruddick on reading and writing in a materialist way. i really enjoyed reading this and I recommend it…

Here’s a snippet:

…concepts matter.  They matter in their distinctions.  They make a difference, in the most literal sense that, in the act of philosophizing, in the invention, creation of a new concept, one is attempting to change sensibilities, provoke new perceptions and understandings, to make difference. This is why we must proceed with caution in attempts to make new or difficult concepts legible to a wider audience; we must be a careful not simply to appeal to a common sense understanding, lest we risk losing the very specificity of the concept in question. It is in this sense, I argue, that we cannot simply substitute a more commonly understood term for its less familiar concept. We cannot for example exchange “affect” for “emotion” (unless we want to launch a fully developed argument as to why they are equivalent) any more than we might substitute “price difference” for “surplus value”.  To paraphrase Deleuze, when a philosopher employs a distinctive term or concept, it is in principle because he or she has a reason to (Deleuze 1978).

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A summary of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1 by Dan Ross

I’ve mentioned this here before but Dan Ross wrote an excellent and accessible summary or guide to Stiegler’s first and perhaps most extraordinary volume of the series at the heart of his project Technics and Time, which was the Wikipedia page for that book. Unfortunately this has been open to some questionable editing and so it is great that Dan has uploaded his version to Academia.edu as a free-to-access PDF. I recommend this as a support to a reading of T&T 1. Dan’s knowledge and interpretation of Steigler’s work is brilliant.

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Reblog> CFP: Epigenesis and Philosophy: A Workshop on the work of Catherine Malabou

This looks interesting:

CFP: Epigenesis and Philosophy: A Workshop on the work of Catherine Malabou

Call For Papers

Philosophy and Epigenesis

A Workshop on the work of Catherine Malabou

March 15-16, UWE, Bristol.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Catherine Malabou (CRMEP, Kingston), ‘Epigenesis of the Text’

In her 2014 book, Avant demain: Èpigenèse et rationalité (Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality) Catherine Malabou explores contemporary philosophical attempts to move beyond the Kantian transcendental via an epigenetic account of the emergence of rationality. In particular, Malabou makes this analysis not only with the intellectual tools of recent European philosophy, but also with the tools of contemporary neuroscience. This project, along with much of Malabou’s other recent work, cuts through the trend to relinquish the Kantian transcendental by reframing the very terms of this debate with reference to recent natural science. In this way, Malabou points the way towards a new future in which continental philosophy boldly embraces recent developments in the natural sciences and rejects the anti-scientific bias which has infected many dominant strands of continental philosophy.

This event aims to further explore Malabou’s recent work both constructively and critically by bringing together scholars in both the humanities and the natural sciences to discuss the questions opened up by Malabou. We invite submissions for 20-minute presentations that fit broadly with the themes of Malabou’s recent work, and in particular, the themes of epigenesis and rationality.

 

Relevant topics include, but are by no means limited to:

  • The work of Catherine Malabou (and in particular, the project outlined in Avant demain)
  • Philosophical considerations of plasticity, life, and the brain
  • Deep History and the brain
  • Materialist and naturalist accounts of life
  • Epigenetics and contemporary European philosophy
  • Philosophical anthropology and natural science
  • Naturalist accounts of reason
  • The place of the organic in Kantian philosophy
  • Epigenesis in German idealism
  • Critical encounters between neuroscience and psychoanalysis
  • The role of plasticity in contemporary thought
  • The relationship between contemporary philosophy and the natural sciences

We especially encourage submissions from underrepresented groups in the humanities.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Michael2.Burns@uwe.ac.uk by February 4th, 2016.

Hosted by the Natural World and Technology Theme of the UWE, Bristol Social Science Research Group, and the Working Group on Contemporary Materialism.

http://www.uwephilosophy.org.uk/

https://contemporarymaterialism.wordpress.com/

malabou event CFP

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Article accepted: Vulgar Geographies? Popular Cultural Geographies and Technology

Some time ago (in 2014), I participated in the Open University’s annual ‘Doreen Massey event’, which had the title Provocations of the Present: What culture for what geography?, and I presented a provocation concerning culture, technology and what is meant by ‘popular’ culture when it’s studied by people like me (broadly – cultural geographers).

I was invited, a few months later, to write this provocation up for a theme section of Social & Cultural Geography. This has finally come to fruition, after some helpful comments by two anonymous reviewers and some very kind help from Nadia Bartolini, Parvati Raghuram & George Revill at the OU and S&CG editor Mary Gilmartin.

I am pleased therefore to share the accepted manuscript as a PDF.

So it’s:

Kinsley, S 2015 “Vulgar Geographies? Popular Cultural Geographies and Technology“, Social & Cultural Geography in press.

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Reblog> Space, Power and the Commons: new book in Place, Space and Politics series

Clive Barnett on a new book out edited by Samuel Kirwan, Leila Dawney & Julian Brigstocke… all smart people so well worth a look!

Space, Power and the Commons: new book in Place, Space and Politics series

9781138841680The latest book in the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics series is now published (technically it is a 2016 book) – Space, Power and the Commons: The struggle for alternative futures is edited by Sam Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke, and is associated with the Authority Research Network. It’s an important addition to the literature on the theme of ‘the commons’, not least because it draws together discussions of high theory on this topic (Hardt, Nancy, Ranciere, etc) with empirical analyses of practices of ‘commoning’.

This is the second title to appear in the Place, Space and Politics series, after the collection on Urban Refugees. There are more titles in the pipeline. More details on the series, including guidelines for submitting proposals, can be found here and here.

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Projecting a genuine future for the living? On Latour & Stiegler comments after the Paris attacks

I was quite surprised at how quickly the translation of the short interview with Bernard Stiegler in le Monde spread on twitter, which is not usual for my posts…

Anyway, I have been struck by a similarity in ethos between the comments made by Bernard Stiegler in his interview and the commentary provided by Bruno Latour in an op-ed (translated by Jane Kuntz) for Reporterre, entitled “The Other State of Urgency” [via Installing (Social) Order].

It is an ethos of calling for the casting-off of a short-termism or ‘death-wish’ (pace Latour) focussed on (inadequately mitigating) destruction–destruction of states, of peoples and of our planet–towards affirming what Stiegler calls a ‘genuine’ future and what Latour sees as a taking of fate into our our hands. One might see it as a loosely vitalist ethos: an affirmation of life and its pluri-potency.

It seems to me significant that both Latour and Stiegler frame the issue in relation to the anthropocene and the COP21 talks being held in Paris. For both of them, the affirmation of a ‘genuine’ future entails combining stances towards ecological, economic, political and scientific atmospheres. Such an affirmation of a sustainable path towards a future of the living is set in contra-distinction to a rhetoric of war, which both thinkers reject in their own ways. To submit to war, in the manner of the French government, is to submit to a short-term imperative to (re)act, but to act for whom and to what ends is a question both Latour and Stiegler find troubling. It is analogous to government via catastrophism – such forms of reaction are already presumed in the mode of ‘normal’ operation: the ‘everywhere war’ and ‘state of exception’ is the new ‘normal’.

Who could argue against an affirmation of hope? I certainly would not. Yet, while there is plenty of diagnosis of the ‘state of urgency’, we are left to ponder: what is to be done?

I don’t think I buy Stiegler’s eurocentric call for policy, it is too easy to see how–even with the best of intentions–this would slip into the kind of technocratic malaise that has buggered up the Mediterranean EU countries. Yet, at least Stiegler attempts to offer strategies – and I think the wider outlining of a political-economics of contribution and of a kind of ‘neganthropy‘, while somewhat grandiloquent, remain inspiring. I would be very curious to see what Latour would suggest in order to “invent demonstrations more innovative than yet another march from Place de la République to Place de la Nation.”

It is, of course, excruciatingly hard to offer strategies for action – as Zizek likes to quip: we can see why it has been suggested that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to the ideological milieu of capitalism. Working for a ‘genuine’ future hurts, but as both Latour and Stiegler demonstrate: it remains the task at hand.

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Stiegler on Daesh and ‘the age of disruption”

I offer a here a quick translation of an interview for Le Monde published past week with Bernard Stiegler, following the attacks in Paris in which he addresses Daesh/ISIS within the context of his conceptualisation of ‘disruption’, which is the context of his forthcoming book [Dans la Dusruption ~ “In the Age of Disruption”].

Only by planning a genuine future can we fight Daesh

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler develops this thesis in his forthcoming book: “In the Age of Disruption”.

Interview by Margherita Nasi.

For the philosopher Bernard Stiegler “war is economic”. The collapose of employment egenders a dispair that in turn leads to violence. “There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value”, he explains.

Since the attacks of the 13th of November the President of the Republic insists” “We are at war”, do you recognise yourself in such a war?

No. What is this “we”? They are at war, not me. War is economic, it is theirs and it creates casualties, including me, who cannot sleep at night, not because of terrorists but because of a lack of future for my children. This is not a war against Daesh, as they suggest, but a global economic war, which takes us into civil war if we do not combat it.

Employment will collapse, especially amongst young people, and dispair breeds violence. We no longer produce reasons for hope today. The attacks of the 13th of November were suicide attacks, which is not insignificant – suicide is developing around the world, especially amongst those young people who know they will not work for a long time.

Both Sarkozy and Hollande failed to provide any kind of prospects for these young people. It is against this stupidity, this madness, that I am at war. A war within myself as well: we are all subject to this tendency to find scapegoats, not to think and not to care. This is barbarism, and that is exactly what Daesh wants: to create civil war. There will be more attacks if we do not change our politics. This is the context of my next book ” In the Age of Disruption”.

What do you mean by disruption?

Disruption is a phenomenon of accelerating inovation which is the foundation of a strategy developed in Silicon Valley: it is a drive to go faster than societies in order to impose upon them models for the destruction of social structures, rendering public powers powerless It is a strategy that tetanises the opponent. In my book, I analyse a text signed by Abu Bakr Al-Naji, as summarised by Ignance Leverrier [former diplomat and journalist], that defines a collective, including former officers of Saddam Hussein that became Islamists. It is a sort of Daesh manual, in the image of corporate bibles that detail the rules to set up a franchise. This book explains how Daesh actors should seize power. One must create chaos and thus exploit the need for some kind of authority.

I compare this strategy with that of the website “Les Barbares attaquent” [The barbarians are coming], founded by Nicolas Colin, a former tax inspector known for his report on the tax system and the digital economy, in which hie highlighted the inadequacy of the tax system for dealing with digital companies, which he describes as the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’, in this case GAFA [acronym for: Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple]. He has since moved to the other side, from public service into the economy which he described as so damaging, to create an investment fund that raises money to practice disruption on the French. Yet, repeating the strategy of GAFA, he can only extend their ecosystem and intensify the colonisation of Europe, wrecking transport, housing, education–all sectors–through new models such as Uber. However, such disruptive practices destroy the social balance, what [German Philosopher] Theodor W. Adorno anticipated by speaking in 1944 of a “new form of barbarism” in relation to the cultural industries.

It is not by declaring war on Daesh that this takes place. This declaration is one way of absolving oneself of one’s own responsibilities by scapegoating people that have become extremely dangerous and who we have co-produced with Daesh.

This radicalisation is thus built on the ruins of ultraliberalism?

Yes. We turn radicalism into a question of religion, and this is outrageous, Most recruits of radical Islam have no religious culture. It is not religion in question but despair. Richard Dur, the murderer of eight members of the Nanterre Council in March 2002, prefigures his actions by speaking about his feelings not existing: he wanted to become somebody by these actions.

In 2012 you launched a call for a global economic peace treaty, is this still a possible contemporary solution for eradicating barbarism?

We need to open out a debate in Europe, take things head-on, since the birth of the web we have all been losing. Exploited by the kinds of disruption practised by GAFA, digital technologies have accentuated the environmental toxicity that has been growing since the beginning of the anthropocene – an era in which humans have become the major geological factor – in terms of the climate, the atmosphere and in mental terms.

There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value: only the transition to an economy producing sustainable forms of value will overcome the challenges that are the subject of the COP21 next week.

We must launch a new European policy rather than aligning ourselves with the American model that is disruptive and suicidal/ We must invent a new Web in the service of viable marcoeconomic model, rather than developing a completely ruinous economy of data. These are the themes of the “Conversations about a new industrial world”, orgainsed at the Pompidou Centre on the 14th and 15th of December. Only by planning [projetant] a genuine [véritable] future for the planet can we combat Daesh, in other words to combat despair.

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Does critical geography need a shock to thought? On Purcell’s ‘joyful geography’

Over on his blog Path to the Possible Mark Purcell has written a thoughtful and interesting piece diagnosing a slip into a kind of cynicism, or perhaps a rut in ‘critical’ thinking in geography, that the predominant disposition of criticality in ‘critical geography’ is of being against– :  “against colonialism, against capitalism, against racism, etc.”.

Purcell argues that a negative consensus of what constitutes ‘criticality’ has developed that has created an orthodoxy of negation:

“I worry that we have become inordinately attached to singing in this key, that we have become unable to do anything other than cancel what we oppose.”

Indeed, this echoes a criticism of the over-coding of the various readings of what one might mean by ‘neo-liberalism’ by James Ferguson in Antipode that, as Clive Barnett summarises: “identifies a standard style of critique as denunciation of exploitation, inequality and oppression” but that can also be rather limited.

In this way we might understand such an orthodoxy of a perpetuation of an adaption to the contemporary milieu, in the form of a negation of its conditions (such as, for example, labelling everything ‘neoliberalism’) rather than an adoption and then rethinking the practices/processes of the conditions that produce it [I’m riffing on Stiegler’s distinction between adaption (as a tendency towards dis-individuation) and adoption (as a tendency towards co-individuation)]. This ‘orthodoxy of negation’ (as I have chosen to call it) can be characterised as a kind of entropy, a slip from proactive thought into what might be a kind of un-thinking or ‘unreason’  and ‘stupidity’ (as Stiegler has it in States of Shock). Stupidity is a necessary tendency for all of us insofar as it is the precondition for knowledge, but we need a shock to thought in order to reinvigorate our capacities for knowledge. Of course, we are overburdened by shocks (as Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine) that appear to arrive with increasing frequency. Rather than submit to simply adapting to the onslaught of ever-more-frequent shocks, following Stiegler’s analysis, we need to engender a therapeutic form of ‘shock’ to our thinking that doesn’t simply confirm a status quo of the orthodoxy of negation.

Reading this together with the argument presented by James Ferguson, who argues:

“what if politics is really not about expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? … Denunciatory analyses often treat government as the simple expression of power or domination–the implication apparently being that it is politically objectionable that people should be governed at all. But any realistic sort of progressive politics that would seek a serious answer to the question “what do we want?” will have to involve an exploration of the contemporary possibilities for developing genuinely progressive arts of government.”

Thus the habitual ruts of critique that Ferguson calls the “antis” (anti-globalisation, anti-neo-liberalism, anti-privatisation, etc.) in which any exercise of power is considered in some way dubious are, perhaps analogous to the forms of ‘stupidity’ (of entropy) that Stiegler argues against. I am not offering a simple and pejorative sweeping dismissal of any of those so-called “anti–” positions, neither am I making a glib appeal to Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that a more affirmative attitude might be necessary and that we all need to be aware of our own ‘stupidity’ (otherwise there’s simply no hope for individuation!).

I welcome a call for ‘joyfulness’ in research and in ‘critique’, a more affirmative attitude towards the exercise of power in the face of the orthodoxy of negation and all of this reminded me of Clive’s excellent reading of James Ferguson’s paper, upon which some of this post has been based. So, for me (and for what its worth) I guess I would advocate a kind of practical joyfulness – one that aspires to the same precepts of communing, of mutual aid, of solidarity that Purcell discusses in his blogpost and begins from the everydayness of doing geography (as an academic, as a teacher, as an activist and so on).

I’ve hardly slept due to a poorly child but I do think it’s worth reading all of these things I’ve linked here together to formulate a way of moving forward… just my grain de sel”Ž 🙂

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Event> The Politics and Economics of Attention (14/12)

Both Clive Barnett and I will be speaking at the sixth seminar in the Behaviour Change & Psychological Governance series (funded by the ESRC) which is being held at the University of Bristol on the 14th of December.

I’ll be revisiting some of the things Patrick Crogan and I wrote about back in 2012 in the themed issue of Culture Machine we co-edited following an ESF-funded conference on attention in 2010. My move forward is probably being a little more critical in my thinking about what constitutes the process of valuing attention (critically reflecting on why a Labour Theory of Value might not quite fit) and thinking (with the work of Bernard Stiegler) about how the socio-technical systems that attempt to economise (something that gets called) attention are a kind of pharmakon (an indeterminacy, originating from the idea of a drug as both poison and cure). By looking at some examples I hope to offer some suggestions about how we might understand what’s going on (in networked technology systems in particular) when an attempt is made to place a financial value on ‘attention’.

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Reblog> Several Essays on Deleuze at LARB

Keith Harris highlights: