Rabbit hole detour into speculative realism

Sometimes I have those days where I wonder if I know anything, anything at all. Then there are other days where some of my wandering falls together in odd and interesting ways. The past couple of days have been a trying and emotionally turbulent roller-coaster, for a number of reasons. But amidst the turbulence, there has been one rabbit hole that has landed me in a potentially fruitful position.

Speculative realism, the vanguard of contemporary continental philosophy, in its object-oriented dispositions may help to tie together some of the disparate strands of my research I have been vainly trying to weave together using a collection of ideas that, at times, seem completely at odds. 

I have yet to really dig too deeply, but I am fruitfully seeing links between Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things and speculative realism, in a way that makes meaningful sense to me. My problem has thus far been the nagging feeling that there is or are questions and ideas that require address before I dig into my own research. Not mere contextualizing or situating, this feeling of a constant beforehand has been plaguing my writing. Who was it that was always after the First Principles? Well, perhaps my feeling is something like that, with an added sense that I am anthropologist so do I have a business messing about in philosophy? Or perhaps the question is: how can I not do the due-diligence of exploring where the research takes me in philosophy considering my bread-and-butter is the real, the actual, the lived and the practiced? What is more apt than lived life, practiced ritual, or the sensuality of sense of both humans and things, inanimate and animate, technical, vegetable, mineral, and so on, for dipping a toe into the speculative realism pond?

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.

modular essay

The modular essay.

A bit part composition
That frames the shored up snows that creep through
And into the assemblage of parts.

It's plane extends as pieces begin to collect, it's dimensions shift and take up new configurations.
I am surprised by its tenacity to cause a frictive sense of generation.

Benjamin was assembling Passagen-Werk. The quotes and scraps cobbled into the famed montage, then the dialectical image. I think of the snowy streets of Paris and the sheltered arcades. The juxtaposed revelation and deceit.

I came upon a modular home one day: it's cubical connections and array of spaces seemed so organized. A veritable spatial neoliberalism.

This two-bit composition: a modelled modular, confirmed through transductive geuss-werk- a veritable political irony.

On refrains and melodies stuck in my head

Play inside Deleuze and Guatarri (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1987:350).

"Produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final end of music, release it in the cosmos-that is more important that building a new system. [the gestural notes of bodies arising from sleep... how does the refrain territorialize itself? What fleshy boundaries must it pass and also fix to create qualities, signatures? How do melody's establish themselves?] Opening the assemblage of sounds to the Machine that renders it sonorous, from the becoming-child of the musician to the becoming-cosmic of the child, many dangers crop up [the rhythm captures, is an apparatus of capture- even in becomings, sometimes]: black holes, closures, paralysis of the finger and auditory hallucinations [the house awakes in the morning, groaning as the rain makes it swell and shift], Schumann's madness, cosmic forces gone bad, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you" (1987:350).

The melody that pursues, becomes lodged, the catchy song: caught up in morning bird-songs where melody's are becoming-expressive as sonorous, guttural, cracking, stretching movements herald a new day.