Dark Vitalism 5/10 – Erebian Nature

August 1, 2010 in Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, Schelling, nature, ontology | Leave a comment

/5/ – The strange process of thought is thought to do more ungrounding then it does or, in other words, the process of thought pushes the onto-epistemological distinction towards one or the other in regards to nature. These two strands of thinking are captured by Pierre Hadot’s Promethean vs Orphic nature. For the former nature is something completely knowable, or eventually knowable, as the source and matter for techne.  For the Orphic approach nature is a monist being which must be worshipped/protected. In both cases nature is already unbalanced by the supposedly limitless power of thought, or the human, to determine nature ontologically and epistemologically. For both approaches humanity stands apart from nature.

First a brief overview of the changing concept of nature:

The Classical view of Nature, that of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics which was generally accepted up through the Medieval tradition, functioned as a kind of inarticulate dynamism with entities such as Fate or the One working as the ontological engine.  This dynamism centers on the question of a fundamental cause, or set of causes, of Aristotle’s four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final), or of Plato’s world soul following from the demiurge. In the classical view, nature is something that humans are immersed in without nature existing as a separate being. In this sense, the question of being and thinking is obscured.

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Natural Horror/Ecological Horror

July 19, 2010 in nature, ontology | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Natural horror has become an unremarkable part of the larger horror canon – giant animals terrorizing humankind has been part of horror film for almost a hundred years. The films generally fall into Hadot’s Orphic/Promethean split: either nature or one element of nature is ‘unbalanced’ by humanity or it centers on scientists playing god with nature. In both cases humans are set apart and we reap the disruption of our existence in, yet separate from, nature due to our lack of understanding or our over-understanding of it.

Ecological or nature horror would seem to center on the interconnectivity or nature in the larger sense and would negate the formalized difference (which is non-ontological) between humans and nature. Shyamalan’s awful eco-horror film The Happening would ostensibly seem to embrace this large theme as vegetative nature attempts to kill humans because we’ve threatened nature on the whole. But The Happening fails and Eco-horror/Nature horror fails (or has failed) because it maintains the artificiality of the human-nature separation to ensure salvation, a salvation which simply is the reaffirmation of the false split.

Eco-horror/Nature horrror has happened only diagonally, mostly in sci-fi horror or horror proper. Silent Hill for instance, despite the heavy religiousity particularly towards the end, has an odd ecological trend. The film contains three simultaneous realities the green world, the gray world (or post-apocalyptic world of industrial ruin) and the third world of demonic revenge. The plot involves a woman bringing her troubled daughter to the town of Silent Hill – a place she has talked frequently about in a kind of fugue state. When she arrives her daughter is lost and the town is under ash rain from a unquenchable coal fire. After an air raid siren sounds the town turns into a dark nightmare, a nightmare caused by witch trials several years prior. What’s interesting about the film is that the border between these worlds becomes less and less clear, worlds which are the originary serene pastoral world of normalcy, environmental ruin, and one of the phenomenal stain – where everything becomes the hauntological.

Silent Hill unintentionally shows the messiness of the ecological mesh not only in terms of various objects of disaster but also via our separation from doomful nature which is artificial at best. While these worlds are all in the same conceptual world  one can lose the connection between them simply through the denial of strange ontological possibilities. By mashing the phenomenal and hauntological into the ecological, ‘nature thinks’ takes on an even darker meaning – affect, trauma and so forth cannot be taken as closed loops of the psyche but as nature tripping over itself in its inability to cast a stable consciousness.

Thinking Nature Update and Issue 1 CFP

June 26, 2010 in Speculative Realism, nature, ontology, transcendental materialism | Tags: , , , | 1 comment

I am pleased to announce that Professor Timothy Morton will co-edit Thinking Nature. The fact that we have similar interests in nature and ecology but very different views should generate a divergent issue. Please submit to the CFP below.

Thinking Nature

Issue 1 Call for Papers

Authors are invited to submit articles for Thinking Nature on the topic of Nature and Thought. More specifically we are interested in papers which address the degree to which philosophy, science, aesthetic, as well as other intellectual approaches adequately (or inadequately) grasp nature whether materially or conceptually. More generally, we hope that contributions will be broad yet specific enough to provide various directions for future issues.

Please send submissions by August 31st.

Submissions should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words.

For references please use footnotes and not  end notes.

Please send submissions to woodardbenjamin@gmail.com

Toy Story 3 ecology

June 23, 2010 in fantasy, film, ontology | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

There is a strong ecological current in Toy Story 3. At its most simplified form Toy Story 3 is 1 Corinthians 13:11 meets reduce, reuse, recycle. Childish things must be properly put away in order to move on not in a generic emotional sense but in an ecological sense. The leering threat of TS3 is the possibility of being thrown away, forgotten, or replaced – actions which unnecessarily generate garbage. Since the life of the toys is their use value the painful lesson of the film is that this value is not directly tied to particular ownership (as the characters initially believe that is, as bestowed by Andy or other children), but that ownership is mostly an imaginative or fantasmatic investment, an investment which is fickle.

The villain of the film (Lotso) tries to control the degree to which the toys (as object-subjects?) are used by humans as he holds a grudge from being abandoned and replaced long ago. Lotso argues that the toys are only junk to humans in a kind of reversal of Woody’s logic where the value of the toys is to be decided by themselves, the value of objects in themselves.

The difficulty of ecology that the film presents then is between the fickle desires of thinking humans and the intentionality of objects. Toys are a peculiar example as they are designed (in abundance) to satisfy desires (or at least direct them) and thus have no ‘practical’ use and are therefore are the most likely to become waste. The recycling of toys become a serious mental or fantastic recycling perhaps ever more than a material excercise. To put away certain things requires  a reorientation of desire, or perhaps a swing to drive, or a narrowing of the ways in which we decide we must materialize our thinking or our desires.

Vibrant Matter – Chapter 5

June 13, 2010 in Deleuze, Harman, Schelling, Speculative Realism, ontology | Tags: , , , , , | 2 comments

In chapter five of Vibrant Matter Bennett turns her attention to vitalism in order to flesh out her project of a vital materialism. As with the previous chapter, Bennett notes the importance of annhilating  distinctions. What kinds of distinctions are being dissolved and in what fashion is a problem obscured in the term materialism. As Graham Harman has noted, the term materialism is less than useful especially in comparison to realism. The central distinction or rupture that Bennett engages is  between matter and force (though not strictly in those terms).

Bennett addresses what she designates critical vitalism (that of Dreisch and Bergson) as an ally of her vital materialism as both theories oppose finalism and mechanism. For Bennett, vitalism points to the possibility of an open or dynamic universe, a dynamism which Bergson and Dreisch saw  as necessary in the wake of too quickly advancing science.

The picture that Bennett paints of critical vs naive vitalism is a bit too clean. Though it may simply be for the sake of brevity, Bennett paints pre-Bergsonian  vitalism as a religious form of philosophical thinking. This treatment of vitalism ignores the materialist trends in the various theories of life force such as those of Haller and Humboldt. Humboldt’s experiences with the work of Volta in particulate illustrates how so called naive vitalism in fact provides fertile ground for a materialist collapsing of the organic and inorganic.

Humboldt’s and Volta’s experiments with frog leg muscle and electric current demonstrate the romantic search for unifying forces in nature which while sometimes relying too much on spiritual thought had promise in attempting to situate electricity, gravity and other forces in the larger realm of nature whether living or not. Bennett’s charge of passive matter (or perhaps more accurately passive bodies or forms of matter) is apt and it is for this reason that Schelling and Bergson both see vitalism as troubling but useful against mechanist views of the universe.

As I noted in the previous entry, my problem with Bergsonian vitalism and D and G’s vitalism by extension is that a spiritual supplement is replaced with a noetic one. In the closing pages of What is Philosophy? D and G take the mechanist modes of  sensation and make it contemplative thereby anchoring vitalism in a kind of thoughtfllness without knowledge. It is this thoughtfullness which seems to be lurking within Bennett’s vital materialism. Furthermore, if vitalism is, as a first step, useful as pointing towards an incalculability it must be thought out how this indistinction must be clarified in terms of ontological versus epistemological so we know the limits of knowing as opposed to the limits of being.

Vibrant Matter – Chapter 4

June 6, 2010 in Deleuze, nature, ontology | Tags: , , , , | 4 comments

Outline

After using a bit of Kafka Bennett begins to discuss how life fits in between the organic and the inorganic registers of existence. Bennett states that life is a “biological category” but one with traditionally humanist characteristics such as “the capacity for emotion, sociality, and reflection” (52).

While animals are surely capable of these functions (though their capacity for the last of the three would require some serious clarifying) Bennett questions how far the category of life can be taken away from the organic.

Bennett then goes on to discuss Deleuze and in particular his essay Immanence: A Life. Life as immanence represents life as a current or stream of happenings that belong to singularites. Bennett amends Deleuze’s joyful life as a (possible) cascade of terrors. Bennett defines life as activity but this activity has an ultimately virtual source naming Nietzsche as an ally (54).

Bennett shows how an overly hylomorphic model of thinking such activity cannot explain forms and that vitalism makes matter and or bodies into passive entities. According to Bennett D and G create a materiality that is a life, a life that is vibrantly heterogeneous (57) which is then connected to Foucault’s incorporeality. Directly broaching the topic of metal Bennett discusses how the vacancies between particles and in materials are as important as the solid components of materiality itself.

Bennett outlines a project of geoaffect or material vitality in order to combat both biocentrism and anthrocentrism via an irrational love of matter or through Perinola’s sex appeal of the inorganic. For Bennett Materiality is the vital principle.

Response

As mentioned in my previous post, my concern with much of Bennett’s work is the humanist traces that remain in her critique as well as the ecological approach as overly horizontal. At the end of the chapter when Bennett invokes Perinola, affect, and Deleuze and Guattari thought becomes a supplement that might be unclassifiable as either material or vital. D and G’s plane of immanence (or thinkable virtuality) seems to move towards an ontologization of thinking which problematizes both vitality and materiality.

While Bennett’s attack on biocentrism and anthrocentrism is warranted, if life is equated with vitality the capacities of the biological seem to get lost. The biological is a difference that shouldn’t be taken as a form of ontological superiority but as a stratification of materiality and fundamental forces. There is a difference between life as biological and life as a humanist category (which is also biological). A life (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) would seem to erase the material (if not ontological) difference between a hunk of metal and a cluster of bees which creates a poverty of temporal-spatial organizational difference.

Bennett’s horizontal approach (like Timothy Morton’s) has some problematic conclusions as certain differences are erased differences which are often seen as strictly humanistic or privileging human beings. But such a view would necessitate forms being either purely ideal, God given, or otherwise unnatural. Materiality as self activating, in D and G’s sense, utilizes a noetic supplement which is far more humanistic than it appears. How this plays out in relation to vitalism vs materialism will be discussed in the next chapter.

Bennett’s Vibrant Matter

June 3, 2010 in Deleuze, ontology, politics | 2 comments

I’ve been derelict in discussing Vibrant Matter. Several posts have been made about the first few chapters many of which are linked here. The most recent posts are on Critical Animal. I  want to briefly present some thoughts on the first few chapters before focusing on the vitalism chapters next week. Adrian has a very interesting post here as well.

Bennett begins in the usual post-human way of expanding materialism and/or phenomenological thought to grasp non-human actants, objects, entities, etc. Bennett engages Latour, Deleuze, DeLanda and the like to outline the life of the inorganic via an untraditional vitalism. In doing this Bennett makes conceptual alliances which are questionable. Deleuze’s virtuality, Latour’s actant, and Althusser’s atoms are put into play without dissecting the ontological and epistemlogical claims surrounding them. The noetic substance of Althusser’s swerve or the plane of immanence holds onto an anthrocentric ghost.

In a related sense, the first chapter is preoccupied with a kind of phenomenological fascination without ontological justification. The fixation on the heterogeneity of the trash in the gutter while an interesting anecdote to gain traction on the inorganic, begs the question of the philosophical path of this fascination.

This worry leads directly to the second chapter which focuses on distributive agency. Again it seems that phenomenological vestiges. As is the case with Timothy Morton’s work, terms such as interconnectivity, heterogeneity and so on beg the question as the attempt at destroying hierarchy creates a less than helpful unidirectionalism. Stratification is necessary. Bhaskar”s work would be helpful here.

Dark Vitalism 4/10

May 26, 2010 in Iain Hamilton Grant, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism | Leave a comment

/4/ – The Stufenfolge and various forces cause an ontic layering which, given the ability of some forms of matter to sense and to think lead to proximal epistemologies. Given the following registers Real-Immanence-Sense-Transcendence the various relations of the layering of the world can be thought but not without the troubling ghost of thought itself as a strange relation. The issue is that thought seems to be a process (although a lesser one) then other formative processes operating through time and space. Yet the ground of thought is far more tenuous than the ground of interactions amongst stones in an avalanche.

Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science which has been covered by Levi in several posts is a useful tool for any formulation of realism. Bhaskar’s Critical Realism articulates a distinction between transitive and intransitive objects in the sciences attempting to short circuit the dominant approaches to philosophy of science as between discovering objective things in the world and as a distinctly (or mostly) sociological production.

Bhaskar’s text is a powerful ally to dark vitalism and to any work of naturephilosophie in that nature is independent and made of real mechanisms. Whether these real mechanisms are things are powers is not completely sure begging the Grantian question via Schelling what is the ground of ground? The ground of ground is either highly difficult or impossible to discover either due to fundamental epistemological limits or due to ontological status. Bhaskar centers not on this but on what ontology is necessary in order for science to be possible. Bhaskar argues that an open admission of ignorance is important as part of a powers-based alternative to Humean evental ontologies (175-177).

Bhaskar’s stratified world has Schellingian echoes as, instead of ontological reductionism, Bhaskar argues that fundamentally different mechanisms operate at different levels. These generative mechanisms form natural necessity which Bhaskar opposes to logical necessity and natural kinds (forming a interesting critique of Meillassoux’s Humean collapse of logical and natural necessity. Generative mechanisms name the local or proximate capture of nature as pure process. Here thought as process shifts the contingency-necessity relationship completely away from any sense of subject (from Meillassoux’s thinkable contingency and Zizekian decidable necessity) as necessity becomes a question of what is necessary for powers – powers that then materialize and these materializations lead to thought.

Vibrant Matter Reading Group

May 16, 2010 in Deleuze, ontology, politics | Tags: , | Leave a comment

As Peter, Anthony, and Adrian have already posted there will be a cross-blog reading group of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter.

The reading schedule will be as follows:

May 23-29
Host blog: Philosophy in a Time of Error (Peter Gratton)
Under discussion: Preface & Chapter 1, “The Force of Things” (and overview/interview).

May 30-June 5
Host blog: Critical Animal (James Stanescu)
Under discussion: Under discussion: Chapters 2 and 3, “The Agency of Assemblages” and “Edible Matter.”

June 6-12
Host blog: Naught Thought (Ben Woodard)
Under discussion: Chapters 4 and 5, “A Life of Matter” and “Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism.”

June 13-19
Host blog: An und für sich (Anthony Paul Smith)
Under discussion: Chapters 6 and 7, “Stem Cells and the Culture of Life” and “Political Ecologies”

June 20-26
Host blog: Immanence (Adrian Ivakhiv)
Under discussion: Chapter 8, “Vitality and Self-interest,” and the book as a whole (final overview).

Why Ecology cannot be without Nature

May 8, 2010 in Iain Hamilton Grant, Schelling, art, nature | Tags: , , , , | 3 comments

Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature is a fairly disappointing text. In many ways it reads like notes on postmodern theory which vaguely concern nature or, more specifically the aesthetics of nature. As Paul has noted here Morton’s classification of nature leaves something to be desired as he calls nature transcendental (14) and furthermore that nature is by its nature juridical and normative (via the use of natural).

Morton’s text does not seem to do much work beyond the posthumanities which has been done better by others and it would seem that a  serious aesthetic engagement with nature should address how aesthetic concerns override nature as that which we are in and made of. The recent struggle over constructing an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound is a perfect example of over aestheticizing nature. The construction was resisted primarily on aesthetic grounds  simply because the swinging blades would disturb the view of wealthy landowners. The construction was also fought by local tribes as potentially threatening burial sites. The primary opposition collapses aesthetic concerns with anti-industrialization creating a false choice between developing clean power and preserving nature. This choice relies on the natural versus the unnatural.

The divide between the natural and the unnatural is rooted in the denaturalization of thought where the emergence of thought itself may be purported to be the advent of such a split. Thought is not however a de-naturalized or denaturalizing event, it is nature’s attempt to become an object to itself. Simply put thought is still natural.

This very split however, orbiting the advent of thought, is subsumed under the dual treatment of Pierre Hadot – between the Promethean and the Orphic, between nature as that which we tie to the rack and that which we deify. This division is self evident even in cultural examples as brainless as Cameron’s Avatar where the Promethean and the Orphic battle one another.

As long as nature ocillates between transcendence and substance (and is neglected as process) as it is doomed to be according to Morton, there is no chance of understanding the posthumanaties without the specter of anthrocentrism.