Down the rabbit hole

Do you ever have the sensation that no matter how rigorously you position your situatedness in the worldings that give way to your research that there is always another ontologically prior position? What I mean is, to what lengths should we go to position ourselves in research philosophically? I'm always mulling over the idea of first principles: where am I staring? What is my ontological understanding of the real within which I find (create/enact/perform/cite, etc....) myself? How far down the rabbit hole must I go to feel that I am contributing something to a world-in-the-making that is 1) unique from what has come before, 2) interesting and not merely navel-gazing, self-congratulation, or self-flagellation, 3) ethically and politically disposed to social change-in many forms, 4) not completely insane. 

Thomas King in The Truth About Stories, has this great bit about telling (and re-telling) a story of creation where the world sits on the back of a turtle. An audience member, no matter the location or age of the audience, always asks: what's beneath the turtle? To which he responds, another turtle. It's turtles all the way down. Down the rabbit hole it's turtles, small, large, and variously adorned ontological turtles. That's the way I've been feeling lately. Like I'm trying to map a pile of turtles, ad infinitum.         

RSAnimate - The Paradox of Choice

An interesting animation of the relationship between late capitalism, social change, and choice: could the relative pacification of publics be a problem of choice and the internalization of loss?

An interesting suggestion, no doubt. I know I've felt completely frozen examining a shelf of similar products in the attempt to choose the "best" one. Equally confounding is the experience of selecting an item from a selection that contains little choice- as though there aren't enough options to choose from. On a broader scale I wonder if that sense of confounding choice leads to a kind of routinization-like voting for a particular political party, just because that's what you've always done and not necessarily because you believe in their politics. Choice (leading to social change) also demands attention and participation, which, considering the intense anxiety and stress part and parcel of everyday life, brought on by the increasing demands of capitals machinations, is wrapped up in fear. Fear of the results of systemic change that despite best intentions are, at best, uncertain. What is social change were somehow unmoored from choice (if indeed it is tied to it), what would it look like? I'm thinking more of re-conceptualizations (of the idea of choice) than some kind of elimination of choice altogether (which would of course be quite contrary to the tenets of equitable social change in the first place). Puzzling idea.    

New Feminist Materialisms

What seems to be an emerging trend in STS and remotely perhaps in anthropology, is a move towards New Feminist Materialisms. With recent publications from Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, an edited collection from Diana Coole and Samantha Frost: New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Karen Barad's 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Whatmore and Braun's, Political Matters: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, and what looks to be an interesting addition by William Connolly entitled, A World of Becoming, and no doubt many other books and articles (I'm thinking of Latour and Haraway specifically), New Materialism is poised to encourage a serious rethinking of the relationship between humans and nonhumans beyond or building out from what we have seen before.

It is without doubt reframing the way I'm writing my dissertation, seeing as I consider very seriously the relationship between people and things (machines) in the concept or ritual/worship practice. So far this rethinking has led me to consider aspects (and possibilities and politics of) material agency but I have been struggling with the inherent dilemma of anthropomorphism even in the attempt to decenter the human in this story. It has been exceedingly rewarding however to read and write through some of these perspectives as they just begin to gain momentum. My hope is that my work will contribute a little something to the process.   

Walter Benjamin on writing

Came across a great blog that included a post on Walter Benjamin's advice on writing. Taking some of it to heart... though perhaps not all. It's seemingly a real slog to get though endless chapters for this dissertation (especially on grey days like today). Not discouraged though, just taking my time.

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line” (Apelles ex Pliny)] — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

From “One-Way Street” (1955; slightly ed.), Reflections:Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 80-81.